Legal Challenges Magazin.

My name is Christina Blacklaws and I am the Immediate Past President of the Law Society of England and Wales.

I have had a long and interesting career in law with three driving forces shaping all that I have done: innovation, access to justice and gender equality.

I originally specialised in representing some of the most vulnerable and deprived children in our society. I was managing partner of a community-based law firm which did a lot of legal aid work.

In the mid-2000s I set up my own law firm which I grew to be the largest specialist family law firm in the country.

At this point, I started to develop new ways of delivering legal services by establishing a ‘virtual’ law firm. Basically, my firm provided all back-office services, including technological, to self-employed consultants across the whole country.

The law changed in the UK which allowed non- lawyers to own and manage legal businesses. I approached one of our largest UK businesses- the Cooperative Group, to suggest that they should develop a family law offering and they agreed.

In 2011, we set up the first UK Alternative Business Structure (ABS).

Afterwards, I became a director of policy, responsible for all external affairs.

Later I moved to a large law firm where I was their Chief Operating Officer and then became their Director of Innovation- responsible for horizon- scanning and development of innovative service delivery and operational models, including technological development.

Throughout my career, I have always undertaken voluntary work which included, since 2002, being a member of the Law Society Council (the governing body of solicitors). I sat on and chaired many committees and boards- often being the chief negotiator with government on important issues.

I really enjoyed this voluntary work as I felt immense satisfaction with helping not only my profession but also the public through the access to justice and rule of law work I undertook.

I became a representative of the Women Lawyers Division and started to work hard around issues of gender equality and balance.

In 2016, I put myself forward for election to the role of Deputy Vice President of the Law Society. (The process entails election to this role and then you succeed to the role of Vice President and on to President).

As soon as I was elected, I started to develop the three themes which had been of fundamental importance to me throughout my career and life - Innovation and the future of legal services, access to justice and gender equality.

With the help of my wonderful colleagues, over the three years as an office holder, I developed and spearheaded some important programmes.

Although we did some great and important work in access to justice, I wanted to tell your readers about the two programmes around Innovation and technology and women in leadership in law.

The technology initiative is so vital. I firmly believe that it is an issue of survival for law firms and legal businesses. We must embrace the best technological solutions and adapt our ways of working to leverage the benefits. If we don’t, we risk our relevancy to our clients.

We developed a partnership with Barclays Bank which led to the first industry specific incubators. This project is supported by some of our largest global law firms and currently there are 20 LawTech businesses in the incubator.

The purpose was to open up LawTech to lawyers from all walks of life and to ensure that the technologists had access to the right expertise from lawyers.

On top of this, we have undertaken many events and roadshows and produced some guidance to help ‘demystify’ technology for lawyers so they can make sensible, well informed decisions about what tech to use.

The purpose was to open up LawTech to lawyers from all walks of life and to ensure that the technologists had access to the right expertise from lawyers.

We have also led on thought leadership and I was privileged to chair the Technology and Law Policy Commission which produced a report on the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system

Finally, the UK government asked me to chair the LawTech Delivery Panel- a group charged with growing the LawTech industry in the UK, ensuring we have the correct regulatory and legislative frameworks and that we are developing the correct training for lawyers for the future. I continue to chair this panel in my personal capacity.

The second main strategy I was able to spearhead was the Women in Leadership in Law programme.

Across the world, women are entering the law in large numbers (in the UK this has been over 50% for nearly 30 years) and yet they are not reaching leadership positions in anything like equivalent numbers.

We wanted to undertake the research so that we had the evidence as to why and could recommend and implement the solutions.

We undertook the largest ever global survey on this subject, an international academic literature review and over 250 round tables in 19 jurisdictions.

The purpose of the round tables was twofold. Firstly, to create an informed discussion around the key issues which we found from the survey: bias, lack of flexible working, the problem of difficult work/ life balances and the gender pay gap and gather women’s lives experienced from around the world. The second, equally important purpose was to empower women to become leaders and change makers in their own organisations and to that end we created a toolkit with opportunities for activism and everyone was encouraged to do something from the toolkit.

I had the privilege of personally facilitating 48 round tables in 18 different jurisdictions.

From these round tables, we produced three reports: one each front he domestic and international round tables and one from the men’s round tables that we held.

In June 2019, we held an international symposium which was attended by lawyers and policy makers from all over the world and during which we explored all the issues and also launched, with the support of our government and all the representative bodies, the Women in Law Pledge which distils all that we have learned into some simple but impactful actions.

After stepping down from the role of President in July, I have been busy setting up my own consultancy firm, helping global legal businesses to develop innovative solutions to ensure future success by combining my expertise in the business of law, technology and people development