Giving members a voice
CILEX President Matthew Huggett welcomes CILEX’s new paralegal members, explains how CILEX is broadening representation on its professional board and reflects on the importance of listening to the membership
The last few months have seen a whirlwind of activity at CILEX, the most significant development being our acquisition of the Institute of Paralegals (IoP) in conjunction with the Professional Paralegal Register.
This will strengthen our position in the legal sector as the professional body for specialist legal professionals at all levels and sees us joined by around 1,000 new members. May I extend a formal welcome to each and every one of the IoP members joining CILEX, and to IoP founder Rita Leat, who I look forward to working with over the remaining months of my presidency.
As the home for paralegals working in legal services, CILEX now has an opportunity to enhance the leading role we play in the sector. We are growing our understanding of the career options and needs of paralegals, expanding our reach into more employer organisations and growing our networks. Naturally, this will aid our progress as we continue to campaign to remove barriers and improve the culture and working environment for members working in the legal profession.
The CPQ is directly linked into the establishment of paralegal and advanced paralegal as career destinations in their own right. It’s not always about becoming a CILEX Lawyer. This provides choice and, importantly, appropriate and meaningful professional and accredited recognition of your legal career. This move will also help employers with reward, recognition and recruitment, through the use of clearly established accreditations and benchmarks that will be used across the legal sector.
Representation on the profession board
We will also be changing the representation on our professional board to recognise the importance of paralegals in our membership and governance structure. You will shortly see our call for applications promoted via the website and member emails. The CILEX professional board represents the interests of all of our members – CILEX Lawyers, Chartered Legal Executives, advanced paralegals, paralegals and students.
Currently, our constitution provides that only Fellows of the Institute may represent the profession on the professional board. We have reviewed this and concluded that it is wrong – we want to ensure all members have a voice and representation in our governance structure to ensure that we are not only inclusive of all parts of the profession, but also that we understand and make informed decisions about what may affect different parts of the membership and profession in different ways. The vacancies will therefore be open to Fellows, Advanced Paralegals, paralegals and students.
As the most socially mobile branch of the legal profession, we have always prided ourselves on being an inclusive organisation. By making these changes we continue to build on this inclusivity.
Meeting our members
The importance of broadening the membership of the professional board was further emphasised when we conducted our tour of England and Wales late last year. Along with my colleagues – immediate past president Caroline Jepson, Vice-President Emma Davies, head of membership Patrick Cullen, strategic partnerships director Lynne Squires and membership manager Louise Tyrrell – I met with many members and employers at our events across the country.
“We are growing our understanding of the career options and needs of paralegals, expanding our reach into more employer organisations and growing our networks”
These engagement events form part of our aim to connect directly with as many members as possible, to listen (first and foremost), to answer your questions directly and to provide you with information on the developments and changes in our profession.
Those discussions include those on the status of our proposal on the future regulation of CILEX and how obtaining practice rights can be beneficial to you and your employer. They include updates on the continuing hard work CILEX is undertaking to open up further opportunities for CILEX Lawyers in the judiciary and address barriers relating to powers of attorney, working as police station representatives and as Crown Prosecutors, as well as dealing with lenders and lending panels and their rules about who can work on their behalf.
We will also be launching new online networking channels for all members in the coming weeks and months that will enable you to network with members in similar practice areas and/or with those at similar stages of their career. We see this as a key development in our role to grow networking opportunities for all our members who may not have been able to attend geographically located branch events in the past.
We will continue to make the changes needed to ensure that we are building a fully inclusive membership organisation that reflects each and every one of us.