From the President

After a very longtwo years awaywe were delightedto finally beable to host ourAnnual

Dinneron 9th June 2022,returning to thehistoric Old Palace at Hatfield House. It wasa fabulous evening, with record numbersin attendance, and I hope that those ofyou that attended enjoyed the evening asmuch as I did. It truly was a pleasure tosee everyone back out there in person, alldressed up and having a good time. VicePresident, and incoming President, of theLaw Society of England & Wales LubnaShuja and the High Sheriff of Hertfordshire,Sally Burton were both excellent speakers,and I could not help but be dazzled by theskills and talent of both the magician BenWolfe and caricaturist, Dan Pilkington,who entertained us for the evening. A fullreport with pictures from the evening is onpages 14-19, but I would again like to saya special thank you to both Judith Gowerthe Treasurer and Honorary Secretary ofHLS and Diana Kirsch the Vice Presidentof HLS, for their invaluable assistance withthe organising and planning of the eventthis year. Huge thanks also to our headlinesponsor Poweredbypie (a Dye & DurhamCompany), and our other sponsors for theevening DictateNow, Badenoch & Clark,Tower Street Finance and EstateSearch.

HLS continues to maintain its commitmentto members this year by running a diverse

range of professional development events.Hertfordshire University and HertfordshireLaw Clinic in conjunction with HLS ran aninteractive discussion on the new no faultdivorce rules in April and we subsequentlyran a Private Client professional developmentevent in June in conjunction with oursponsor, EstateSearch. We have three furtherprofessional development events scheduledfor later in the autumn on Conveyancing,Family and Compliance issues and I wouldurge members to please attend the events asthey are free for HLS members and thereforegood value for our member firms.

In mid-May I attended the local lawsocieties virtual town hall meeting hostedby the President I. Stephanie Boyce and VicePresident Lubna Shuja. Top of the agenda wasa call to action to support the Law Society’scriminal legal aid campaign to stop criminallegal aid from collapsing. In five years’ time,we may no longer have a criminal justicesystem worthy of the name:

• The number of criminal legal aid firms hasalmost halved in the last 15 years

• duty solicitors are increasingly scarce insome parts of the country

• only 4% of duty solicitors are under the ageof 35

After 25 years of cuts, the government now hasthe opportunity to invest in our justice systemand put it on a sustainable footing. However,the government’s proposals for criminal legalaid for solicitors are 40% below what theIndependent Review of Criminal Legal Aididentified as the bare minimum needed to

start to address the crisis. Learn more about what the Law Society is doing here https:// www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/legal-aid/ defending-the-future-of-criminal-legal-aid and get involved if you can.

On the lovely sunny evening of 7th July I attended a drinks reception and the formal renaming of the Grace Ononiwu Law Court Building at the University of Hertfordshire in honour of Dr Grace Ononiwu CBE, alumna and the first Afro-Caribbean person to serve as Chief Crown Prosecutor in the UK and currently Director of Legal Services for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). It was a fantastic evening of food, drink and entertainment with some awe-inspiring stories from Grace and her fellow alumni.

Coming up (and at the time of writing), I am due to attend the local law society conference on the 14th July and then the day after I am in the Isle of Wight for the second meeting of the year of the Southern Area Association of Law Societies (SAALS), and I look forward to updating the members on both, in the autumn.

Once again I thank the committee who all volunteer and are busy working hard to plan for more events in the year. If you have any interest in joining the committee or any ideas for events, lectures or seminars then please get in touch.

Steve Hamilton President, Hertfordshire Law Society