December 2025 Newsletter

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by

Legal Voices for the Future
in

Dear LVF members

Welcome to LVF’s December newsletter!

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Jane Goodall

This edition of Legal Voices for the Future’s newsletter is a bit longer than usual (please bear with us), and includes:

  • Look back at our Bristol November KS and our December KS on ‘Climate Activism in the UK’
  • A round up of our achievements over the last year
  • Thank you from the Stewardship Committee and plans for 2026, including our next book club topic

See you next year,

Bristol Knowledge Session: the Environmental Permitting Regime

On 22 November we held LVF’s first ever regional knowledge session on the Environmental Permitting Regime (EPR). The session took place in Bristol and online, and it was a pleasure to collaborate with the UK Environmental Law Association (UKELA)’s South West committee on this event. During the knowledge session, Nina Pindham expertly chaired a panel of Lord Banner KC, Marcus Reynolds and Jo Pope, who presented their expert takes on the EPR.

Philipa Shepherd and Sasha Anisman have prepared a write up of the event, available here. At LVF, we’d love to organise more regional knowledge sessions just like this one. So if you have a proposal for a knowledge session, please don’t be afraid to get in touch with us even if you are based outside of London. We would love to support you in making your idea a reality!

December Knowledge Session: UK Climate Activism

On 9 December we had our last knowledge session of the year on ‘UK Climate Activism’, led by LVF member Tanvi Ajmera and LVF Stewardship Committee members Carol Yuen and Orla Heatley.

As part of the creative content group discussion, we watched a clip from documentary film “The Line We Crossed”, directed by Liz Smith and featuring Clive Dolphin. Check out the film’s website for screening information and to propose a screening near you!

If you weren’t able to join, the recording is available on our YouTube channel.

We had an excellent panel discussion:

  • Owen Greenhall, barrister at Garden Court Chambers, mentioned that Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights on the rights to freedom of expression and assembly provide important protections for protestors. The proportionality test required in those provisions places the burden on the state to show that the restrictions placed on protestors are proportionate to the recognised public interests of national security, public safety, etc.
  • David Whyte, professor at Queen Mary University (QMU), expressed concerns about the growing restrictions for protestors and shared about the project at QMU to systematically study effects of restrictions and the criminal sentences imposed on protestors.
  • Sarah Finch, activist and claimant in a landmark planning-environmental case in the Supreme Court, shared that her experience with the law was generally positive given the success in the R (Finch) v Surrey County Council Case. However, she was involved in a long legal battle in opposing a persons unknown injunction against all campaigners, which was eventually whittled down to an injunction against a few known persons. In this regard, see the challenge against UK Oil and Gas’ attempt to ban protests at three sites, and the eventual Court order modifying the persons unknown injunction to an injunction against known defendants.

Clive Dolphin, activist and spokesperson for Defend Our Juries, shared that retaining jury trials is crucial to ensuring that the legal system works for the people.

LVF 2025 Recap

As the year draws to a close, our Stewardship Committee are reflecting on what has been a very exciting year for LVF. We have seen LVF grow considerably in the last year, in terms of LVF’s offering and in terms of membership, we started the year with approximately 560 members and now have just under 1,000 members! This means that it has been a BIG year for LVF!

We have hosted a total of 15 events: 10 knowledge sessions, 3 members-only webinars, 1 careers event and 4 community events for the new LVF Community, which is our community initiative to help members connect with one another. We have hosted coffee meet ups, our first ever field trip to Wakelyns Agroforestry, our first book club and swap, and trips to different exhibitions like the Soil exhibition and the Wasps exhibition.

We have sent 14 newsletters (including two careers focused ones), have 5,545 followers on LinkedIn and achieved 216,174 “impressions” on our posts. We launched our new website in October 2024 and had over 2000 visitors across +50 countries. We also launched the LVF blog and shared 9 blog posts, and our YouTube page has 110 subscribers!

Our highlights for 2025 include:

1. Wakelyns: Our first knowledge session “retreat”.

2. Legal Careers: Our first careers event.

3. Applying for funding.

The behind the scenes work at LVF takes dedication, commitment, organisation, advanced preparation, patience, support and a lot of trial and error! Our funding applications are an example of trial and error that we are really proud of, as sometimes failing is the best opportunity for growth and reflection. This year, we have applied for 4 funding opportunities. V.Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Stephen Lloyd Award, the Boring Fund, and the Matthew Good Foundation.

Preparing these applications has encouraged the Stewardship Committee to think more strategically about LVF’s impact on the legal sector, as well as the opportunities and limitations facing our organisation and its growing community, while carefully balancing the pursuit of funding with preserving the freedom of innovation and core essence of LVF.

We are especially grateful to our friends at The Chancery Lane Project, for their time, guidance and ongoing generosity sharing knowledge and helping us develop our funding proposals, providing references and challenging the us with new ways of thinking – as a stewardship committee of lawyers, funding applications have been a new territory, and TCLP’s advice has been invaluable. As a group of 12 volunteers from across the legal industry, the Stewardship Committee members are grateful to (and for) one another and for what we have achieved this year, we really couldn’t have done it without each and every member’s contribution! So here is to us, for what we have achieved and for all the 2026 committee will inherit and take forward!

Thank you for your support

We would like to say a big thank you to our members, knowledge session hosts, panellists, facilitators and venue partners for the ongoing support for LVF this year. We hope you have been able to take away knowledge and new connections.

We remind you that our short member’s survey is always open. It takes less than 10 minutes and we really appreciate your feedback and want to hear how you think LVF can be improved.

LVF runs completely on donations and the Stewardship Committee’s free time to make everything happen. Thank you so much to our supporters on Ticketsource or BuyMeACoffee. We also send a special thank you to Joshua Domb and Gen-R Law for their donation early this year, which has allowed us to purchase our LVF banners (photo below) and cover running costs this year such as Mailerite through which we send all our member emails. As LVF scales up our costs are going to increase. Therefore, if you’re able to, we’d love you to donate (maybe a Christmas present to LVF…?) via ourBuyMeACoffee page, either on a one off or monthly basis. Your donations help us to grow LVF by enabling us to pay for our GDrive subscription, to fund travel expenses for speakers and to fund costs for events like Wakelyns and to invest in amazing banners which we have proudly displayed at our events this year (see below!).

Looking ahead to 2026…

Knowledge sessions:

We have some amazing knowledge sessions in the pipeline for 2026, including:

  • Industrial animal agriculture;
  • Legal systems change;
  • The work of central banks on climate and nature; and
  • Biodiversity litigation.

If you would like to propose your own knowledge session, you can do so using this form.

Community:

  • LVF is 3🎂: We look forward to reconnecting with everyone at our LVF Birthday Event. Details will be shared early January!
  • Poetry event✍️
  • Book Club📖: We are excited to launch our second series of LVF Book Club! We previously focused on the topic “Bugs” and will now be looking at “Rivers”. We encourage members to pick a book and then to come to our meet up (which we will be arranging in Spring 2026) and swap their books to reduce waste and continue learning about the topic. The books we have chosen are:

You can purchase any of these books second hand through the links to World of Books.

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