PRO BONO SOCIETY

NEWSLETTER

ISSUE SIX

KEY DATES :

Members Social 23rd Febru-ary

Outlaw Mock Trial Applica-tion Deadline 5th February 12:00pm

Aspire Application Deadline 7th of February 9:00pm

Mark Mullins Talk 1st March

Ex-Chief Inspector of Pris-ons Nick Hardwick 15th March

Achievement Award Applica-tion Deadline 25th April

For more information and to get a digital version of this newsletter, purchase a Pro Bono membership, check out our Facebook page and email any questions to lawprobono@nottingham.ac.uk

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Voted Best

Society

2017

Over 8 Core

Projects and

500+

members

Volunteering with our projects is formally recognised by

both the Society and the Law School with the Pro Bono

Achievement Award, a highly regarded certification.

LawCareers.Net Awards 2018

The awards highlight and celebrate the amazing

work that societies at campuses do across the

whole country and the fantastic events and op-

portunities they create for their members. The

Nottingham Pro Bono Society is proud to an-

nounce that we have been nominated for two

awards! The winners will be announced in March

2018. We would like to give a huge thank you to

our members and volunteers because this would

not have been possible without the dedication

and work you guys contribute. Here are the

awards we were nominated for:

Pro Bono Members Social

We will be having our first ever mem-bers social this semester! It will be on Friday February 23rd at 8:30pm. We will be going to a bar in town, followed by an amazing night in Ocean. Tickets will be available the week before and for more information about where to buy them and price please visit our event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/472020649861465/

Achievement Award

The award is recognised by the Uni-versity of Nottingham Law School and is given to students for participating in a variety of Pro Bono work within the Society. The deadline to complete and submit the necessary volunteer work is the 25th of April. So get in-volved as much as you can this se-mester!

Semester two is set to be incredible

for Aspire! We have formed relations

with a Brownies pack based in

Beeston, and are looking to work with

TeachFirst, NTU, and the Children’s

University. In addition, Aspire will

continue to deliver its standard work-

shops, and there are more of them

this semester. On Thursday 15th Feb-

ruary, Aspire will conduct workshops

in three classes at once, a record for

this year. Volunteers who attended

workshops last semester need only

send their availability to lawprobo-

no@nottingham.ac.uk by Wednesday

7th Feb, 9pm. Volunteers who were

unsuccessful last semester or haven’t

participated before are simply asked

to send 250 words to the same ad-

dress by the same time explaining

why they wish to participate, and any

relevant experience if possessed.

OutLAW is back with more exciting opportuni-ties this semester! We will be hosting our first ever inter-school mock trial competition this Se-mester! The first session of the competition will be held on Monday 12th February between 10:00am and 12:15pm. If you would like to de-velop your skills in public speaking and (most importantly) have fun, please consider applying for some of the roles available! Applications to be involved close Monday 5th February at 12 noon. Alongside the other sessions of the com-petition OutLAW will be hosting: A debating ses-sion at Toot Hill School (28th February), A UCAS/legal careers presentation at Chilwell Sixth Form (14th March), A Law Insight Day held on campus and featuring taster sessions from academics and legal professionals from a top 45 UK law firm and a leading international law firm. We will also have the Pathways to Law Commercial Law Masterclass (attended by rep-resentatives from BLP) in conjunction with the Widening Participation Team Look out for emails advertising applications for these events soon!

The quarter-final rounds for the Negotiation Competi-tion are now complete and participants will be finding out whether they will be proceeding to the semi-final this week. The competition so far has been very, very close indeed. Trainees from Berwin Leighton Paisner will be visiting the University of Nottingham to judge the semi-finals on 14th February. The final round of the competition will be taking place on 14th March. Finalists will be travelling to Berwin Leighton Paisner’s office where they will be judge by associates and partners. We wish you all the very best of luck!

Project Updates

What’s On

After a successful launch event in November, A2J recruited six new volunteers to help with the project. The team now consists of volun-teers from a variety of law and non-law back-grounds and we hope the addition of students studying computer science will give us an ex-tra boost. This semester our plans are to visit schools and colleges to test out 'Adventures with Lex', a game which teaches legal rights to children, and to create a functioning web-site which explains legal rights in an under-standable and creative manner. The team will have its first meeting of the semester next week.

Last term JLAP successfully sent off over 200 books in collaboration with the ILBF to a law school in Eritrea and we are sure they will make a massive difference! This term, we have started a ‘twinning scheme’ with the University of Khartoum in Su-dan whereby students from the University of Nottingham are partnered with a stu-dent in Khartoum to enable them to discuss the similarities and differences of stud-ying law in each country and to generally learn more about one another. We are al-so hosting a blogging competition and inviting you guys to write a short piece on a relevant topic of your choosing (e.g. poverty, inequality, homelessness, refugees, trafficking etc.) which will then be published on the JLAP blog! Please get in touch at afygh3@nottingham.ac.uk if you are interested in either of these opportunities.

Our partnerships and schemes with the Personal Support Unit and Centre for Crimi-nal Appeals are going well. Our Innocence Advocates for the Centre for Criminal Ap-peals are making some really good progress in their murder appeal and we are re-ceiving fabulous feedback from the PSU about our volunteers, well done guys! We also have a couple of exciting new opportunities coming up within Streetlaw this se-mester! We are finalising details with the Infringement Project which is a charity dedicated to safeguarding against female genital mutilation (FGM.) We are looking for a group of volunteers to receive training on the subject who can deliver presen-tations and seminars in the local community to educate as many people as possible regarding how to spot a possible victim of FGM. Keep your eyes peeled for more de-tails on this opportunity! We are also working alongside the law school and Citizen’s Advice to hopefully set up a bespoke volunteering programme for UoN Students. This is still in the early stages, but we are hoping we can have this all finalised and started this semester! StreetLaw is also working with the rest of the committee and student volunteers to help organise fundraisers for our entry in the Bar Pro Bono Unit challenge, so keep an eye out if you would like to help raise some money and feel free to send in any ideas you may have!

What’s On

Volunteering with our projects is formally recognised by

both the Society and the Law School with the Pro Bono

Achievement Award, a highly regarded certification.

This term we have two more exciting talks lined up, so keep an eye out for e-mail reminders about them! On the 1st March we have a talk with criminal barrister Mark Mul-lins and on the 15th March with ex-Chief Inspector of Pris-ons Nick Hardwick. There are also two more talks in the pipeline so watch out for those too! These talks are all great opportunities to gain different insights on the crimi-nal justice system - we hope to see you all there. The pro-ject is also in discussion with Werrington prison and will have another trip this term so keep your eyes peeled for that! Also we have two members of Werrington’s staff coming to give a talk and the date for this is soon to be confirmed!

There are some exciting new opportunities with Unbarred this term. We are continu-ing the disclosure work with HMP Whatton and Sudbury, which are still receiving hugely positive feedback form all the participants. The volunteers have been bril-liant. A few workshops at HMP Whatton have led to difficult discussions of the reali-ties of their disclosure and notificiation of their offences and being on the Sexual Of-fenders Register, volunteers have been incredible at listen to their concerns, remain-ing supportive yet honest.

Additionally the interview workshops are really taking off! After the success of the first workshop at HMP North Sea Camp, we will be returning there this month. This workshop will also be introduced to a brand new prision HMP Lincoln. This is a wom-an’s prison and a category B prison, making it the highest category. We are also in talks with HMP Whatton about introducing these workshops there also. The volun-teers again are great on these workshops, and able to deal with the smaller groups and mock inteview situations impressively. It is also a great opportunity for non-law volunteers to thrive even more and hope this new dimension of the project will mean even more non-law students will get involved in the project in the future.

We have just closed our second round of applications and will begin interviews next week, the standard of applications this year have been extremely high. We are look-ing forward to welcoming the new volunteers and holding our welcome social!

Next Years Pro Bono Committee

Its the time of year to start thinking about if you would want to be more than a

member of our Society and become part of our committee. Positions which will be

determined through elections include: President, Vice President, General Secretary

and Treasurer. All Project Head positions will be chosen through an application

process and interview by the current Project Head. Feel free to email us and ask us

any questions about the process or talk to any current committee members to get

a feel for what its like to be on our committee. Here are some tips for what to in-

clude and what not to include in your project head applications:

Looking Ahead