BILETA Conference: thanks

Too early for reflections, but never too early for thanks…  So thanks to —

  • My co-chair Abhilash Nair: totally committed, wonderful eye for detail, kept calm…
  • The Admin/Tech Team: Maureen Cooke & Anne Conway (powered through the admin, great sense of how to put a conference together, and how to make participants feel welcome), Ian Ferguson (calm, ever-helpful, great design of webpage).
  • Social networkAnn Priestley (aka Ann of Denmark) — worked brilliantly — and BILETA for funding the set-up of the network.
  • Keynote speakers, Chris Reed & Richard Susskind.  Outstanding keynotes that helped shape and define the conference theme.  Great work.
  • BILETA executive — ever-helpful, stepping in as session chairs, etc.  And they’ll be as helpful in the near future as peer-reviewers of conference papers too 🙂  Especial thanks to the outgoing Chair, Sefton Bloxham, with whom Abhilash and I worked on the project.
  • Grateful thanks to our sponsors, without whom the conference simply could not have taken place — or if it had, it would have been nearly twice the price, so about half the folk who came probably would have been priced out.  That we had record numbers of attenders for recent years, and record numbers of papers was due in no small way to this.  In no particular order: The Higher Education Academy, LexisNexis (Tom – great to see you again), Oxford University Press, Routledge, Northumbria University, law firm DWF.
  • Staff at the Centre for Life Conference Venue were extremely helpful throughout.  Technology worked very well, and they served up some of the best conference food I’ve tasted — outstanding value, and my compliments to the chef!
  • To all conference participants who signed up, paid up, joined the social network, gave interesting papers to time — what more can you ask?
  • Anyone else I should have thanked but am too tired at the moment to remember — apologies!

Oh yes, one final thank-you — to BILETA itself, the institution, as represented by its executive & the law school participants at the annual conference who support it.  My first conference was sometime around 1994, I think, I’ve been coming pretty consistently since then, been on the Exec, been Chair, done a keynote, done lots of session papers, been funded at least three times on projects.  I love it, and hosting its conference was in a sense paying a debt of honour for all it’s given me.  I hope all those who attended the conference enjoyed it as much as Abhilash and I did, and if you did and read this, leave a comment!