President perspectives: Christina Blacklaws

During your presidency, what was your biggest highlight?

For me, it was the Women in Leadership in Law project, which I started off when I was elected deputy vice president.

Over three years, we were able to design, develop and deliver a global campaign which included research about why women in the legal profession were not getting to leadership positions commensurate with their desires and abilities.

We worked with the International Bar Association (IBA) and discovered this was a global phenomenon involving systemic bias.

We undertook the largest ever international survey to better understand the barriers which prevented women in law from progressing. This involved more than 14,000 lawyers across the world.

The insights from this informed 250 roundtables. I was privileged to facilitate 50 of these, in 19 jurisdictions. They, in turn, led to three insight reports: domestic, international and from the men’s roundtables.

We were able to get UK government support for a Women in Law Pledge which distilled everything that we had learnt into an eight-point programme to help organisations make effective change.

The pledge is still going and is used by organisations to make positive change around gender and for other under-represented people in law.

That was the absolute highlight of my time as an office holder and as president.

What was the biggest challenge you and the Law Society faced during the year?

The biggest challenge for the profession during my term was Brexit. Back then, there was still enormous uncertainty.

We didn't have a deal, and we didn't know whether we were going to get one – or, if we did, what it would look like for professional services.

That put a lot of pressure on legal businesses.

At the Law Society, we spent an enormous amount of time, effort and energy influencing UK government and trying to help firms prepare for a range of scenarios and consequences.

What was the biggest success during your year?

I felt very strongly that the Law Society needed to support the profession to engage with appropriate automation and legal technology.

We needed to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. I knew this technology would change the way we delivered legal services and that if we ignored it, then we were at risk of extinction over the medium to long term.

We seized the moment to focus on this, and I believe we were able to really move the needle for understanding and adoption during my time as an office holder.

We established a really successful collaboration with Barclays Eagle Labs, setting up the very first incubator which looked specifically at legal technology and how to support law tech start-ups.

We undertook research with Oxford University, focused on the challenges law firms faced in adopting technology and how they could be addressed.

With the UK government, we set up LawTech UK, which is the Ministry of Justice body. I have chaired this from the outset and continue to do so.

That body had three ambitions:

1. to get the legislative and regulatory framework right (this area is being led by the master of the rolls, Sir Geoffrey Voss)
2. supporting law firms to be able to successfully adopt technology
3. supporting start-ups and scale ups with a whole programmatic activity

We’ve recently added in an aim, which I’m completely passionate about, to address the fact there are over 11 million people in England and Wales who, as of 2024, have an unmet legal need.

Of course, not all use of tech is positive. We also undertook an influential commission which I chaired to assess the impact of algorithms in the criminal justice system.

This highlighted serious civil liberty concerns and the need to proceed with extreme caution.

What was the biggest surprise during the year?

The biggest surprise – and the greatest delight – was how incredibly supportive, engaged and active people across the entirety of the Law Society and the profession were, particularly with the gender agenda.

I had assumed that, given how busy practitioners were, it was going to be hard to get engagement and activism.

But wonderfully, people really rolled their sleeves up and were willing to put their own time, effort, and energy into the Women in Leadership programme, which ensured its success. It was an inspiring time!

What three words would you use to describe your time as president?

I asked Microsoft’s AI tool Copilot to sum it up for me. It said my presidential year could be encapsulated in these three words: innovation, diversity and advocacy.

And who am I to go against Copilot?