Advisory group

Amanda Finlay was a Trustee of Law for Life from 2009, when she retired from the Ministry of Justice. During her career she was an advocate and supporter of Public Legal Education, and was a member of Professor Dame Hazel Genn’s PLEAS Task Force and of Lord Bach’s Public Legal Education Strategy Group. She was Chair of Law for Life from 2011 until 2023.
Amanda is a Council Member of Justice. She was a member of the Justice Working Groups on Access to Justice in an Age of Austerity, and on What is a Court? and chaired the Justice Working Group on Preventing Digital Exclusion from Online Justice.

Amanda was a member of the Civil Justice Council (CJC) from 2009 -2012 and was a member of the CJC Working Group on Litigants in Person Support Strategy and of the MOJ Litigants in Person Engagement Group. She is now a member of the MOJ LIPS Strategic Engagement Group .

She is a member of the Greenwich University Law Advisory Forum . She was Vice Chair of the Low Commission, and was a Trustee of LawWorks and a public governor of Oxleas NHS Mental Health Foundation Trust in South East London.
During her long career in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, and then the Ministry of Justice, Amanda worked on many aspects of access to justice. She was the MOJ Director responsible for legal aid strategy and for legal services reform. She led work to improve the forecasting and control of legal aid, introducing more predictable fee schemes for lawyers. She built on research and client surveys to target legal aid on more vulnerable groups. She led the arrangements to set up the Legal Services Board. She worked with the legal profession, academics, social workers and client representatives to develop improved arrangements for both private law and public law children cases. She supported the case for tribunal reform set out by Sir Andrew Leggatt in his review “ Tribunals for Users” which in time resulted in the Unified Tribunal service. She worked with human rights and asylum lawyers, and with the immigration and asylum judiciary, to develop HR compliant new asylum appeals primary and secondary legislation.

Amanda led the work on the Human Rights Act in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, working with human rights lawyers to ensure that the scheme of the Act was workable in the courts and leading ten all day “walkthroughs” to test out compatibility with judges, lawyers and human rights experts in courts from the magistrates up to the Court of Appeal. She was Secretary to Lord Woolf’s Inquiry “Access to Justice”, working with the judiciary, lawyers, academics and lay people to devise improvements to the civil justice system.

Earlier in her career she was engaged in work to open up legal services to more competition, including work with the Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct on rights of audience applications from solicitors and employed lawyers, and the establishment of the Legal Services Ombudsman. Amanda was secretary to the Legal Aid Advisory Committee; worked with Richard White and Cyril Glasser (founder members of the Legal Action Group) on their report on unmet need for legal services in the 1970s and was engaged in the work to set up the Crown Court and the Court Service following the Courts Act 1971.

Anne has a particular interest in Family Law and Policy, especially the regulation of adult relationships such as cohabitation and marriage, but has also taught and researched in the areas of comparative law, housing law and welfare law and policy. She led a 3 year interdisciplinary study funded by the ESRC on Mapping Paths to Family Justice, looking at Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution of private family law issues. This was followed by 3 phases of ESRC Impact Accelerator Awards, Creating Paths to Family Justice where she worked with a number of agencies including OnePlusOne, Relate, the Ministry of Justice, the Family Mediation Council, Resolution and CAFCASS to draw on research findings to develop online and offline mediation services and information for couples and children. She is a co-investigator in an interdisciplinary team for the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health - a new, world-leading research centre dedicated to providing innovative approaches to enabling health and well-being across the life course.

Pascoe is a leading international expert in social science research methods, access to justice and legal capability. His research is primarily focused on issues of access to justice; also extending to the methods used in this field. Following his successful stewardship of the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey, much of his recent work has continued to concern the design, development and analysis of data from 'legal needs' surveys (surveys of citizen and business experience of legal problems). He was lead author of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Open Society Justice Initiative’s (OSJI) 2019 global guidance Legal Needs Surveys and Access to Justice, and the access to justice chapter of the United Nations Praia City Group’s 2020 Handbook on Governance Statistics. These two publications were instrumental in the United Nation’s 2020 adoption of a first global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) concerning access to civil justice (Target 16.3.3).

Sharon is Research Director at the University of Bristol’s Personal Finance Research Centre. Her research explores the intersections between vulnerability and personal finance. For example, the Centre has examined ways to address the Poverty Premium faced by low-income households; and delivered a programme of work on how financial services firms identify and treat consumers in vulnerable circumstances.She is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney; a member of the UK Financial Services Consumer Panel, a statutory panel that represents the interests of consumers in the development of policy for the regulation of financial services; the UK Financial Inclusion Commission; the government’s Financial Inclusion Policy Forum; and is on the Council of the Pensions Policy Institute.

Gráinne is a Professor of Law and Social Justice, and Co-Director of the Ulster University Law Clinic. Her research has examined the interplay between social justice and administrative justice, focusing on participation in, and structural reform of, tribunal processes; the overlaps between the social security and criminal justice systems in a niche area of research examining social security fraud and associated social security sanctions; and comparative processes of legal decision making in administrative and public law systems and the access to justice implications that arise, particularly for litigants in person.

She is currently Chair of the Discretionary Support Review expert panel to review the Discretionary Support (DS) scheme which provides financial support to individuals in crisis situations in Northern Ireland.