The LILI conference 1999-2006: a reflection

Here Alison Bone (University of Brighton), Chair of the Learning in Law Initiative (LILI) throughout its lifetime, looks back at what made the annual LILI conference so popular. In 2007 LILI was relaunched as the Learning in Law Annual Conference (or LILAC), a two day celebration of legal education.

I was surprised and flattered to be asked to write about the LILI conference – and yet a little reluctant too! If you visit the UKCLE website and do a basic search you may understand why. Virtually every paper ever presented is up there, and there is so much detail on who gave which keynote, on what topic and how many different universities people came from.

What should I write about? Perhaps a statistical piece ("the top presenter was...whereas 154 people have never presented a paper at all, but regularly attend")? No, too tedious. A Hello style piece ("in 2002 Roger looked particularly relaxed and spent the evening chatting with acquaintances from Scotland")? Too patronising and boring. A philosophical piece ("LILI can never be replaced, but it will, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes in a new guise")? Too theatrical. Clearly the answer is to try a bit of everything and hope you don’t spot the joins!

“LILI helps us to identify how we are doing compared to our peers – and gives us reassurance that we are not alone. ”

The first LILI conference was held in January 1999 at the University of Warwick. Except for a trip to Coventry TechnoCentre in 2002, they were all held in Warwick, because that is where UKCLE (and its predecessor, the National Centre for Legal Education) is based. And all were held in January, largely because nothing much else happens in January and UK academics have a few free days before term starts! Perhaps surprisingly, the weather over the years has been relatively kind – nothing so awful that prevented delegates from arriving or leaving – and we always managed to stay in one building for almost everything, so there was no braving the elements to catch the next session.

LILI 1999: Challenge and change in legal education

I missed the inaugural conference, but benchmarking was the key theme. Keynote presentations were delivered by John Randall (then Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency) and Lewis Elton of the Higher Education Research and Development Unit at the University of London. It is difficult to tell from the archives how many people were at the first conference, but 40 different universities were represented plus 12 further education colleges and a dozen ‘others’, including the Law Society, the Bar Council and the Institute of Legal Executives. The conference was international from the start - papers were delivered by delegates as far flung as New Mexico and China.

LILI 2000: Learning from experience and the experience of learning

In 2000 I attended my first LILI conference and convened a panel session with Fiona Church (now Assistant Dean of the School of Law and Criminology at the University of Derby), Ruth Soetendorp and Linda Byles (both at the University of Bournemouth) and Avrom Sherr (Woolf Professor of Legal Education and, since 2004, Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London). Issues addressed included teaching law to non-lawyers, assessment and the future of legal education. These topics, and others such as the first year experience, innovative teaching methods, quality assurance and the role of the academic, surfaced again and again this is one of the hallmarks of the conference - it always addressed issues to which all academics can relate regardless of their subject area.

LILI 2001: Value vs values in legal education

Avrom gave a keynote speech in 2001 as did Suzanne Shale (then Director of the Institute of Advancement of University Learning at the University of Oxford). Paul Maharg (Glasgow Graduate School of Law) ran the first of many sessions on the use of multimedia in law teaching. Key issues addressed included the impact of recent policy developments on justice, ethics, access and equality in legal education.

LILI 2002: Response and responsibility

In 2002 in Coventry, Lord Justice Potter, then Chair of the Legal Services Consultative Panel, and Diana Tribe (University of Hertfordshire) were the keynote speakers. By now LILI was firmly established, with a growing number of delegates from both old and new universities and a hard core of returners who were keen to hear discussion of topical issues from both experts and those who had to deal with them on a day to day basis.

LILI 2003: Complexity, creativity and the curriculum

In 2003 we were back at Warwick, and one delegate told me this conference was the “best ever”. This was first year a plenary panel discussion was held – a feature that has been repeated at every conference since. John Bell (University of Cambridge), Ann Holmes (Staffordshire University), Pat Leighton (University of Glamorgan), Richard de Mulder (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) and Avrom Sherr (IALS) debated amongst other things employability, widening participation, quality assurance and globalisation.

LILI 2004: Is legal education working?

The future of the legal profession was debated in 2004, with Joy Harcup (Berwin Leighton Paisner) giving the opening address. This conference saw the introduction of the student competition, which drew a reasonable response and went from strength to strength. It was a valuable exercise for both the students who wrote the essays and the academics who judged them!

LILI 2005: The experience of law: living, learning and earning?

By 2005 the number of parallel papers had risen to 22 - making a choice was getting difficult. Some law schools solved the problem by sending multiple delegates, who could between them cover all sessions. Paper this year included reports on the growing volume of UKCLE-funded research.

LILI 2006: Using your imagination: illuminating legal education

Over 130 delegates attended the eighth and final LILI conference, making it the biggest ever with a total of 28 papers, plus the ‘question time’ session and keynote. Following in the footsteps of Georgetown’s Carrie Menkel-Meadow in 2005, David McQuid-Mason, James Scott Wylie Professor of Law at the University of KwaZulu Natal, become the second keynote speaker to enhance LILI’s claims to international status.