Introduction from Midlands Regional Director

REGIONAL UPDATE

At the LLG AGM this year, the company resolved by membership vote to bring the Branches into the direct control of the company and consolidate the regions. This was done in order to ensure parity of service within the regions and provide targeted supported whilst ensuring greater accountability and transparency for our grass roots membership across England and Wales.

Following open elections, I was elected as the Regional Director for the Midlands Region.

In order to ascertain which Region, you now fall within, I attach a map which shows the new boundaries.

A BIT ABOUT ME

I am currently Head of Legal and Governance at Warwickshire County Council and Deputy Monitoring Officer. My career has given me the opportunity to work in both the public and private sectors and to represent a wide range of clients.

I applied for the role of Regional Director for two key reasons: Firstly, I believe very strongly that the work lawyers do is critical to ensuring that local authorities can provide the support and services that our communities need, and secondly, I wanted to play my part in addressing the increasing challenges facing lawyers in local government to build a better and more resilient future for those coming into the sector.

My background is in projects and construction work but my work in local government allowed me to expand my horizons into many interesting and diverse areas of law, and brought opportunities to deevelop strategically and as a leader. I believe the broad grounding in law and governance that a career in local government gives is hugely valuable and creates well rounded lawyers with experiece that is significantly more hands-on than many other sectors. Attracting strong new talent is critical to ensuring the resilience of our sector and I very much hope we can work together to innovate and support each other in developing that resilience.

In order to address the challenges we face, it is really important that we understand what is important to you so that we can provide support and training in areas of benefit and value to you, and to enable LLG to continue delivering best practice and advocating for the membership, and for the sector as a whole.

MOVING FORWARD WITH THE REGION

I am absolutely delighted to represent our Region and I am really keen to hear your thoughts on how we might better serve your interests locally. I am also particularly keen to hear from anyone running local groups within our Region and learn about the support which could be offered to ensure these vital meetings continue to take place.

I am currently devising a communications strategy along with my fellow Regional Directors to ensure that we are able to both disseminate information from the Board and enable a mechanism to feed back up from the grassroot membership. Between us, we are also considering in-person and remote events/training, relationships with framework providers and joint working opportunities, regional bursaries to attend LLG Conferences, and links to educational establishments to grow succession within the profession. If you have any other ideas or thoughts, then please do not hesitate to contact me at nicholavine@warwickshire.gov.uk and please copy in membership@llg.org.uk

I very much look forward to creating a vibrant, engaged and networked region.

Best Wishes

Nichola Vine