• Congratulations on winning the Outstanding Individual Achievement Award at the British Legal Technology Awards 2023! Tell us about the significance of this award, what did it mean to you to receive it?  

It feels weird to put the significance bit in my own words, so here is the blurb from the website in answer to the first part of the question:

The Outstanding Achievement Award recognises an individual who has been instrumental in shaping and driving the evolution and successful impact of technology within legal services. Nominated by the judging panel, this award honours an exceptional advocate within legal technology who has displayed leadership, excellence and vision over a long serving career.

Now obviously it was lovely, but the last part of that made me feel old!! Over the last couple of years, a few of my longstanding projects have come to fruition. 

I have been writing about the legal change needed to accommodate digital documents and assets for the best part of two decades, so it has been pretty meaningful to be able to oversee and implement law reform in those areas, knowing that it will now have an effect.   

It’s the sort of doctrinal work that is not often celebrated in contemporary academe (and is certainly not attractive to most funding bodies) so I like the thought that this recognition might give encouragement to those working in similar spheres. 

• What are you finding most fulfilling about your work at the Law Commission, can you tell us a highlight from working as Law Commissioner for Commercial and Common Law?  

A highlight would have to be being the principal witness to the House of Lords Special Public Bill Committee when the Electronic Trade Documents Bill (now Act) was going through the parliamentary process.  

I love being in the physical environs of parliament anyway (the buildings are just incredible, inside and out), but being grilled by a committee of peers for an hour was like a supercharged viva – such a buzz. (I can say that now that I know the bill passed… :) ) 

I think that’s part of what is so fulfilling about the job as a whole; getting to discuss fiendishly difficult legal questions with judges, parliamentarians, academics, lawyers and ministers on a daily basis is pretty much my dream job (training guide dogs aside). 

As I say above, it’s also been fantastic to see my work having an impact in the real world; the International Chamber of Commerce has recently valued the ETD Act 2023 as being worth £25 billion to the UK economy and £10 trillion worldwide.  So that’s a few schools and hospitals...

• How has your legal research informed your work at the Law Commission and vice versa?

Well it only really works one way – I don’t have time to do any academic research these days BUT my past work has been enormously helpful in my role as Law Commissioner.

As I said above, a significant amount of my research as an academic had been concerned with the law’s response to technological developments. Our recent Law Commission projects on Digital Assets, Smart Contracts, Electronic Trade Documents and DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) have drawn extensively on that knowledge base, as well as on discussions with people I met through doing that work.

That’s to be expected to some extent I suppose, but one thing that has surprised me has been how much of my (almost) two decades of teaching has helped me. I always seemed to teach across a broad range of subjects and I often wondered whether that was counter-productive in that I was spreading myself too thin. I used to teach, for example, Tort, Contract, Personal Property, Agency, International Sales, Criminal Law, Commercial Remedies and Economic Analysis of Law. I have used every single one of those in my current job! So in the end, it has been a relief sometimes to sit in meetings and be able to pull something out of the archive that I didn’t even know was there…

• What advice would you give to new students starting out on their Law path at Bristol?

It’s not you; it’s law.

I so often hear people complaining that law is difficult. I always tell students not to shy away from that, or to be intimidated by it, but instead to take power from it. Of course law is hard – some of the finest minds I have ever known struggle with it and they always will.

But that’s why it’s worth studying and thinking about. So stop waiting for it not to be difficult and accept that its complexity is what makes it so valuable. Embrace the fact that it is difficult and wear it as a badge of honour!

We do that with physical training all the time: once we can run a certain distance or lift a certain weight or achieve a certain yoga pose, we don’t stop there – we step up a level. It’s just the same – it won’t get any easier, but you will definitely get better at it (and because of it).