In the hot seat

Journal Editor Neil Rose interviews the new CILEX Chair, Eileen Milner

For Eileen Milner, the role of CILEX chair seems to have come at just the right time. After a 40-year career that has seen her work across the public and private sectors, as well as in higher education, it was CILEX’s social purpose and mission that appealed to her when approached about the job.

“What I do in my working life now has got to give me a strong sense of purpose that aligns with my values,” she explains. “These are ensuring that people at all stages of their lives have opportunities to realise their potential and be supported to do so, and sometimes to exceed what they believe their potential to be because not everybody is blessed with the confidence to know what they want to do.”

Ms Milner is currently chair of the Children and Families Trust for Bradford and District and also at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. Prior to pursuing a portfolio career, she was chief operating officer at the Care Quality Commission and later chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency, accountable to Parliament for a budget of some £67bn and responsible for key policy areas including skills, apprenticeships and technical education, as well as being the regulator of colleges, independent training providers and academy and free schools.

This experience of the world of education obviously chimes well with CILEX and the 61-year-old is impressed by the CILEX Professional Qualification: “As someone who's spent a lot of time looking at qualifications over a period of years, I would say it is a well thought-through and rigorous programme.”

“The focus should be on taking all and every opportunity to talk about the value that CILEX-qualified legal professionals bring to the world of law” 

Being able to combine study and work “gives people a hugely valuable perspective that they bring to the workplace” and she supports the idea of exporting it too. “There are many parts of the world where British legal education is looked to as representing very high-quality product. CILEX has been in international markets previously. And what we are working to do is to strengthen and deepen still further our presence in the UK market.

“But as we do so, we're taking all and every opportunity to think about where we could translate this into international markets because it's a good thing to do. The more people who qualify through the route, the more advocates there are for it, the higher the reputation will be. So growing that participation is absolutely key.”

Ms Milner says this because, though aware of CILEX research showing how many members feel a lack of parity with solicitors, the focus should be on taking “all and every opportunity to talk about the value that CILEX-qualified legal professionals bring to the world of law”.

She explains: “We need to talk confidently about the impact CILEX lawyers have and we want to have more of them because the louder the voice, the more common it is for a CILEX professional to be at the table, then actually the less of an issue it becomes about where and how you're qualified.”

Greater competition

She is similarly bullish over the greater competition there is for alternative routes into the legal profession, with solicitor apprenticeships the most obvious challenge to CILEX. “Having championed apprenticeships and routes into professions for a long time, actually I celebrate all and every route that gives people access to professional careers,” Ms Milner says.

“The thing that will differentiate CILEX, not just through apprenticeships but through the CPQ too, is that the route is of the very best – it’s of the highest quality, people are well supported as they travel through it, and they come out with skills and capabilities that enable them to demonstrate that they are excellent lawyers.

“So rather than lament the fact that there are others in the market, actually celebrate the fact that we are very good at this and that we are going to continue to build and strengthen our reputation, because it's through reputation that people are attracted to qualifications and that employers will choose to put people through it.”

Her career has given Ms Milner plenty of experience of lawyers, and indeed she has managed large legal teams in the past. This has helped her recognise “the immense amount of value that they bring, the perspective they bring and the absolute commitment to helping to navigate some of the most challenging issues”.

A proud history

As she gets her feet under the table, Ms Milner declines to list detailed objectives for the role: “CILEX has a proud history and my objective is to build on that history and to make sure that we are together as a membership, creating an organisation that can look to the future with confidence in the contribution that it has made, is making and will make. The role of the chair and the board is to make sure that all the pieces are in place strategically and operationally to support that ambition.”

“I've now met quite a number of members and I know how much they feel that it is important to have a professional body is that is confident, appropriately assertive and ambitious” 

It is also not the time to comment on the planned switch from CILEx Regulation to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, or indeed the wider regulatory environment for legal services. “I can observe that the law is not alone in having complex regulatory environments,” she acknowledges. “The same exists in health, but good regulation at its best is that to support public confidence and every element of regulation should be working together to make sure that public confidence is at its highest.”

CILEX has an outward-facing role on issues such as access to justice, of course, and Ms Milner says it is for all members to continue making the case. While every government “extolls a commitment” to ensuring access to justice, she says, that does not always translate to reality. “I'm only one of the voices of CILEX – we have a president, we have a community of senior lawyers with lived experience of bringing access to justice to bear – and we need to work as part of the wider legal community.”

Artificial intelligence

Another obvious challenge is the rise of artificial intelligence. Her sense is that, at the moment, “there is a bit of overestimation of how quickly AI is going to hit any sector or setting, but a likely underestimation of how profoundly it could change professions and some of the support areas around them in the medium to longer term”.

We need to be thinking about AI as lawyers’ “partner”. She talks about an AI application in the medical world that could allow doctors to undertake a particular assessment in 15 minutes, whereas now it takes 90.

Another obvious challenge for the legal profession is the rise of AI

“It's not taking away from the professional judgment that is required of the human. But what it is doing is replacing an awful lot of analysis, time, triangulation of perspectives, bringing in a range of other disciplinary perspectives and giving the clinician who has to make the final decision a comprehensive picture that they can work with much more quickly. I think we're going to see quite a lot of that happening.”

This means being “really thoughtful” about how roles will evolve. “And just because there's some element of human activity that might be displaced, it doesn't mean that other elements of human value may emerge. And I'm sure there are lots of paralegals who feel that at the moment they're doing things for which they're overqualified. And what we want to do is to be able to develop them into those higher-value areas of work.”

Ms Milner speaks fluently and has a clear determination to play her role in advancing the CILEX profession. What message does she have for the membership at this early stage of her tenure? “I am hugely positive about the future for CILEX. I'm very confident, I've now met quite a number of members and I know how much they feel that it is important to have a professional body is that is confident, appropriately assertive and ambitious.

“And CILEX is all of those things, but wants to be ever more so the voice, the body that is bringing the value of CILEX members into more public discourse than perhaps it has been in the past. And that's part of the role of the chair.

“But, as I said, everybody's got a voice and I want a confident membership and that's what our members have told me they want as well. My job is to help support and enable that.”