Coralie McKeivor, AGM 2025 Presidential Report banner

Coralie McKeivor, AGM 2025 Presidential Report

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This past year has been a busy one for us all at Bristol Law Society. The Exec team have been busy and Helen and Clair have both been incredibly busy over the past year. Particularly with the return to a full in-person programme alongside our webinar programme and bringing more sponsors on board.

We have been continuing to work on the CRM system and upgrades to the website as we continue to invest in the future of the society, with the hope that the short-term pain, will have a longer-term gain. Changes will also assist with our more flexible Council and Committee structure, and the hope is that this will continue to expand as well continue to bring the technological upgrades and changes in place.

This year we also rebranded the Annual Awards Dinner as the Bristol Legal Awards and hopefully you all enjoyed the evening. We have been working on the rebrand since January 2025 and hope that many of the changes ensure consistency and an easier workload in future years with opportunities for cost savings as well as a more sustainable event. As part of this we also created an awards microsite which is more agile and more in line with professional awards events.

As mentioned in my speech at the legal awards this year I wanted to acknowledge here as well that we sadly lost Robert Bourns, Partner at TLT, former President of both Bristol Law Society and The Law Society of England and Wales, and Edward Langford of Knights and Rebecca Stevens of RWK Goodman.

At the legal awards I only touched on a couple of highlights for the year, but I wanted to do a slightly deeper dive into what we have accomplished this year.

  • Throughout the year Helen and I have met with all our corporate members, managing partners and sponsors. Much of these meetings took place in December, January and February and shaped many of the things that we have done this year and the work in the committees.
  • One of my goals was continuing to expend on existing initiatives that promote diversity equity and inclusion.
  • We continued to hold a lot of events in collaboration with Ethnic Solicitors Southwest including our Bar & Bench Event, our second cross firm Iftar, Resilience and Coaching Event, and Black History Month event and our final event of year next week.
  • We launched the Disabled Solicitors South West Network in Disability Pride Month. We held an event in collaboration with the Legal Neurodiversity Network in June and a BD without Barriers Event in July with the BD Partner. We continue to have regular coffee mornings and roundtable discussions with a couple of events planned over the coming weeks for Disability History Month.
  • As mentioned that the Legal Awards we completed the first year of our Bristol Legal SQE Scholarship. A lot of work was put in by the committee to set up the framework for the scheme and to make an application for the SRA SQE Access and Reinvestment Fund. As well of course reviewing the applications and interviewing the shortlisted candidates. In partnership with the College of Legal Practice and our first scholarship covering course fees was awarded to Roisin Millard. Following our success in being awards additional funding from the SRA, to support candidates with SQE exam costs. We’ve also been able to cover Roisin’s SQE1 exam fees and set aside funding for three other aspiring lawyers who have been successful following our recent round of interviews. We are excited to get hopefully expand this programme next year to include things like work experience.
  • Another one of my goals this year was to continue to promote and grow Bristol + Bath Legal Tech. This year for BBLT we launched the BBLT Academy and held our 2nd annual WE R Legal Tech Conference in May. We also collaborated with ILTA Women in Legal Tech and hosted the first event here in the Southwest in May and now a few of our members are taking this forward and held the second event in October. We also took part in the Bristol Technology Festival in October. We are already planning our next conference in May – save the date for 13th May.
  • At the beginning of the year, I said I wanted to strengthen our communicated and our collaboration with others. Back in March we also celebrated the Law Society of England and Wales 200 years anniversary event, with TLS president Richard Atkinson and CEO Ian Jeffery. I had the privilege of sitting on the panel event. Throughout the year I have had the pleasure of attending other Joint V cities and local law society dinners including Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Plymouth, Cornwall, and also attended the 27 Group gathering in Bath. I also visited chancery lane for the Law Society Local Law Societies Town Hall in May and the Opening of the Legal Year in October. Later this week we are also hosting the Joint V law societies here in Bristol as we continue to work together and collaborate on key issues affecting our membership.
  • Other new initiatives this year have included setting up Legal Runner group, a Legal Apprentices Network, our Net Zero Pledge and the launch of our Green Badge Initiative with Landmark as well as the other aforementioned collaborations. We have also strengthened links with other professional networks including ICAEW and CBI and will continue these links going forward.
  • On the events front we have had also held our regular conferences, our regular webinar programme and other regular events such as our Menopause Forum. We also saw the return of events such as the burns night dinner, our NQ celebration event, the late summer party the MP Dinner and Battle of the Bands (which raised over £2,200 for my charity of the year) and the Bristol Legal Walk (which raised over £4,200 to access to justice foundation).
  • I am also delighted that we raised just under £9k for my Charity of the Year with the funds raised at the Battle of the Bands and Bristol Legal Awards.

There are lots of fantastic things we have achieved together and I am delighted that we have achieved so much this year and hope that with many of the initiatives and investment of time we have also built something for the future for the society going forward.

So now to say some words of thanks. Thank you to all of you for your hard work and giving up your free time to volunteer with Bristol Law Society. Thank you to Exec for their support this year: Salma, Stuart, Rachel, Ben, Sabeena and James. Thank you to Helen and Clair for their support and hard work. Thank you to Council and Committee members for getting stuck in and to our members now numbering well over 7500, for your continued support.

I am grateful to each and every one of you for helping me make this year a success.

Coralie McKeivor

President 24/25

18 November 2025