Legal Week remains somewhat arms-length from its own awards ceremony, the British Legal Awards. That’s mainly because the awards have an independent judging panel – and a very high quality one at that – with the aim being to avoid the event turning into a prize-fest for our best contacts.
That said, we do try to draw on Legal Week‘s editorial experience to assist the process. That happens in several ways. Firstly, Legal Week – largely meaning me and our deputy editor, Georgina Stanley – help to whittle the award entries down to a shortlist for the judges to consider. Frankly, that was a pain this year, because for reasons I won’t try to explain we had a record number of entries, up 20% on last year. So apologies to the considerable number of lawyers, firms and barristers sulking at our news team this week for not getting shortlisted – in most categories you were really up against a lot of competition.
