Types of Neurodiversity
Neurodiversity covers a wide range of conditions, and each one shows up differently in legal recruitment. Choose a condition below for a short overview, then read the full guide to the strengths it brings, where bias creeps into the application process, and what legal employers can do about it.
ADHD
Treat ADHD as a single, predictable profile and it becomes easy to misjudge almost everyone who has it. ADHD affects attention regulation, impulse control, energy levels, organisation and information processing, but which of those shows up, how strongly, and in what situation, differs enormously from one person to the next.
Anxiety disorders
“Anxiety” gets used as one word for a lot of different experiences, and that’s part of the problem. Someone who gets nervous before a presentation and someone whose anxiety shapes decisions they make every single day are often talked about as though they’re describing the same thing.
Read the full guide: Anxiety Disorders in legal recruitment →
Auditory processing disorder
Auditory Processing Disorder is easy to misread as a hearing problem, and that misreading gets in the way of understanding it. Someone with APD typically has entirely normal hearing on a standard test.
Read the full guide: Auditory Processing Disorder in legal recruitment →
Autism
Picture the word “spectrum” and most people picture a line, mild at one end, severe at the other, with every autistic person plotted somewhere along it. That picture is wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that actively shapes hiring decisions.
Developmental language disorder
In a classroom of 30 children, on average two will have Developmental Language Disorder, making it more common than autism and more common than dyslexia. Most people have never heard of it.
Read the full guide: Developmental Language Disorder in legal recruitment →
Disfluency (stuttering/stammering)
Stammering, also called stuttering (the same condition, just different regional terms, UK versus North America), is usually described using an iceberg. The visible part, repeated sounds, prolonged words, a moment of getting stuck, visible tension in the face or neck as someone works to get a word out, is only the small portion showing above the waterline.
Dyscalculia
Formal understanding of dyscalculia is, in a very literal sense, still catching up. The British Dyslexia Association didn’t publish an agreed clinical definition until 2019, and researchers in the field estimate the science behind dyscalculia sits roughly thirty years behind the equivalent research on dyslexia.
Dysgraphia
Dysgraphia occupies an unusual position among the conditions covered in this series: there’s no dedicated diagnostic pathway for it in the UK. It isn’t listed as its own distinct category in the diagnostic manuals used here, and it tends to be identified instead as part of a broader assessment for a Specific Learning Difficulty, often alongside dyslexia or dyspraxia, rather than through any standalone route of its own.
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is probably the most widely recognised condition in this entire series, and also one of the most persistently misunderstood, a combination that’s more damaging than either fact alone. The British Dyslexia Association estimates around one in ten people in the UK are dyslexic, yet over two-thirds of people who have it are thought to leave school without ever being formally diagnosed, which means a great many adults have spent years working around a condition nobody ever named for them.
Dyspraxia / developmental coordination disorder
Ask most people what dyspraxia is and they’ll describe clumsiness: dropped cups, tripping over nothing in particular, difficulty tying shoelaces as a child. That description isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s badly incomplete, and the parts it leaves out are precisely the parts that matter most in a professional setting.
Epilepsy
Ask most people to picture a seizure and they’ll picture the same thing: someone collapsing, convulsing, losing consciousness entirely. That’s a tonic-clonic seizure, and it’s real, but it’s far from the only way epilepsy presents.
Mental health conditions
LawCare’s most recent Life in the Law research found that 69% of UK legal professionals had experienced some form of mental ill-health in the past year, and yet, in the same research, only around half of those people had actually spoken about it at work. That gap, between how common these experiences are and how rarely they’re discussed openly, is really the starting point for this whole piece.
Read the full guide: Mental Health Conditions in legal recruitment →
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
“I’m a little bit OCD about my desk” is one of the more damaging phrases in everyday use, not because tidiness is a bad trait, but because it quietly redefines a serious, often debilitating condition as a personality quirk. OCD-UK, the charity dedicated specifically to this condition, is direct about the distinction: what separates an ordinary preference for order from clinical OCD is the presence of genuine distress and significant disruption to daily functioning, not simply a liking for things being a particular way.
PTSD
PTSD used to be called shell-shock, and that name has left a lasting, narrowing mark on how the condition is still widely understood. PTSD UK notes this directly: because of that history, there’s a persistent, widespread assumption that PTSD only affects military veterans, when in reality it can affect anyone, of any age, following any sufficiently distressing or frightening event.
Sensory processing disorder
Sensory Processing Disorder isn’t a standalone diagnosis. It doesn’t appear as its own separate entry in the diagnostic manuals used in the UK, and it’s more accurately understood as a recognised feature that frequently accompanies other conditions, autism and ADHD most commonly, though it also appears alongside dyspraxia and can occur on its own.
Read the full guide: Sensory Processing Disorder in legal recruitment →
Tourette’s syndrome
Ask most people what Tourette syndrome is and they’ll describe someone shouting swear words uncontrollably. That’s the near-universal cultural shorthand for the condition, and it’s also badly wrong for the overwhelming majority of people who actually have it.
Read the full guide: Tourette Syndrome in legal recruitment →
Visual stress
Visual Stress, formerly and still sometimes known as Meares-Irlen syndrome, first described independently by a teacher and an educational psychologist in the early 1980s, describes a cluster of visual symptoms triggered by reading: text that appears to shift, blur, shimmer, or develop a glare or halo around it, alongside headaches, eye strain, and fatigue during sustained reading, all occurring despite entirely normal eyesight. As of 2025, the UK’s SpLD Assessment Standards Committee has recommended that the older names, Meares-Irlen syndrome and Irlen syndrome among them, no longer be used in clinical practice, in favour of the more neutral, current term Visual Stress.