THE new president of Yorkshire Law Society made history when she took up office this week.

Jenni Bartram, a partner with Crombie Wilkinson solicitors, is the first woman to hold the post in the society’s 224-year history.

For a year, she will combine her duties leading the solicitors of York and rural Yorkshire with running her firm’s Malton office, doing legal work for the National Farmers’ Union and being the mother of three children.

Mrs Bartram hopes her election will encourage other women to aim for the top posts in their profession – and persuade men that women shouldn’t lose in career terms when they take time out to have a family.

She said: “We still live in a men’s world. There are still not of lot of women who continue after having children to become partners and equity partners in firms, actually running a business.”

She urged firms to look for flexible arrangements that would prevent the profession losing women who start a family, and called on women to think about their future over the long term as well as the short term.

Mrs Bartram was the society’s first woman secretary some years ago and has served on its council.

Her priorities during her year in office will be to raise the profile of women lawyers and to widen the society’s membership. Currently, limited to practising solicitors, there are plans to change its constitution to include qualified solicitors working in other fields – legal executives, paralegals and university law lecturers, among others.

Mrs Bartram was educated at York College for Girls in Low Petergate, which closed in the late 1990s.

After studying law at the University of London and Chester College of Law, she joined Crombie Wilkinson in 1979.

She became a partner with the firm in 1984, specialising in agricultural law, and headed its Selby and York offices before taking over the Malton office.

Her son, Tom, a fast bowler with York Cricket Club’s First XI, is training in Durham to be a solicitor, and her older daughter, Caroline, is a horse rider in Malton. Her younger daughter, Rosie, is studying for her A-levels at St Peter’s School, York.