Trustees and patrons

Trustees

• Dr Vanessa Davis, Interim Chair
• Jon Spain, Treasurer
• Raymond Sheehy
• Joe Broadway
• Abiodun Olatokun
• Savita Narain
• Jennifer Dinley
• Rohini Jana 

Patrons

Our Founding Patrons are:

• Professor Dame Hazel Genn DBE QC,
• The Rt Hon. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury
• Lord Briggs of Westbourne

Biographical details:

Trustees

Vanessa’s early career was as an academic linguist and then senior civil servant at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, before she re-trained as a barrister in 2005-7. She spent three years helping run a large legal aid charity working in refugee and immigration law, before becoming the Director General of the Bar Standards Board in 2011. She retired from  the BSB in 2020 and since then has undertaken non-executive and legal and regulatory consultancy work for charities, not for profits and public bodies. She is on the Board of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal and the Kings and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer in Edinburgh (where she lives). She serves on the General Medical Council and on the House of Lords Conduct Committee. Vanessa is a Bencher of Inner Temple , and has served as both a volunteer and Trustee of the PSU (now Support Through Court.) She has been a  Law for Life Trustee since 2017 and assume the role of Interim Chair in November 2023.

Having qualified as an actuary in 1977, Jon spent 12 years at Clay & Partners (now part of Aon), followed by 28 years at GAD until May 2018, when he retired. In 1997, having promised himself 20 years earlier, never to take any further exams, he also qualified as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (which was no easier than becoming an actuary). Now I am Treasurer of 2 UK charities.

Raymond Sheehy has been the Chief Executive of Bridge Mental Health in Woolwich since 2009. Previously the CEO of a learning disability and mental health charity, he is currently Lead Governor of Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and a Panel Member on the Monitor Independent Advisory Panel.
Mr Sheehy is now working with his team on the development of new models of delivering services; social and commercial enterprises, and a range of innovative support and housing options for people who have experienced or continue to live with a mental health problem. He has established the first non NHS run Recovery College which now serves the people in Woolwich"

Joe Broadway is Director of Legal Affairs and Company Secretary at CFH Docmail Ltd. He created and ran Velopost, a fossil fuel free postal delivery service, as a separate business unit within CFH Docmail, for three years. He received the 2015 Business Insider Magazines 42 Under 42 award which "recognises some of the South West’s most dynamic and inspirational young entrepreneurs and celebrates their success in helping grow the regional economy”. He has recently become a volunteer advocate at the Free Representation Unit, is a Trustee of the CFH Total Document Management Retirement Benefit Scheme, and was a fundraiser and volunteer at READ International.

Abiodun Olatokun is a researcher and project manager focused on exploring the connection between rights, citizenship and education. He is the Head of Public and Youth Engagement at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. This year he developed an online course called 'Citizenship and the Rule of Law' (https://www.coursera.org/learn/citizenship-rule-of-lawLink opens in a new window), in collaboration with the University of London. He is also the Coordinator of 'The Rule of Law for Citizenship Education', a nationwide programme in which young people are taught about the rule of law and human rights. Abiodun is a member of the Solicitor General's PLE Committee and helped to draft the minister's vision statement in 2019.

Abiodun has also worked as a political organiser encouraging young people and disenfranchised groups to participate in public life. He has led voter registration projects that have successfully registered hundreds of thousands of first-time voters, working with the Cabinet Office and other partners to promote voter engagement in the run-up to the 2016 European Union Referendum. Abiodun helped to establish the charity ‘Product of a Postcode’ in East London and has been a trustee of three other organisations in addition to Law for Life.

Savita has worked for the not-for-profit sector for over 25 years and has a wealth of experience in managing advice and rights-based organisations. She has a MA in Race and Ethnic Studies from Warwick University and Postgraduate Diploma in Voluntary Sector Management from Bayes (formerly Cass) Business School. Savita is an experienced trainer, a qualified NVQ assessor and completed a CAST Digital Fellowship in 2018.

Savita’s key achievements include setting up a Law Centre and leading Rethink’s Advice and Information Service through a period of consultation and change. From 2012-2018 Savita was Deputy Director of Against Violence and Abuse (AVA), where she developed HR, governance, IT, digital communications, training, and evaluation systems.

Her role prior to joining Family Rights Group was Senior Manager at Help on Your Doorstep, an Islington-based community organisation, where her responsibilities included managing the Good Neighbours team and leading the transition to Covid-safe services during the pandemic.

Savita volunteered as a Trustee of the Public Law Project from 2016 – 2020, during which time she became Vice-Chair of the Board.

Jennifer Dingley is a Senior Product Manager at Citizens Advice, where she leads teams of engineers to develop digital products that help people access the advice they need.

Jennifer started her career as a Solicitor before completing a Masters in Business Administration and retraining as a Digital Product Manager at Amazon. While at Amazon, Jennifer launched and scaled ecommerce business lines to support third party sellers selling products with supporting services in the UK and Germany.

Rohini is Head of Parliamentary Affairs with the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, has been part of the advice and community sector for the past eight years. Her background in finance law in the City has given her a unique perspective on the importance of access to justice and the role of public legal education in achieving this.

Patrons

Lord Briggs of Westbourne is a Justice of the Supreme Court. He focussed on the needs of litigants in person in the Chancery Modernisation Review which he conducted in 2013. He highlighted the importance of public legal education in his Civil Courts Structure review in 2015 and 2016 . In that report he said that the level of success of the new online court in extending access to justice would  depend critically upon parallel progress being made with public legal education generally, and recognised the need for affordable legal advice on the merits of any case.

Lord Briggs was appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2013 and as a Justice of the Supreme Court in 2017.He was Deputy Head of Civil Justice from January 2016 until his appointment to the Supreme Court.

Professor Dame Hazel Genn is a leading authority on civil justice whose work has had a major influence on policy-makers around the world. She is currently Dean of the Faculty of Laws, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at University College London.

She has held full-time research posts at Oxford University Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. She served on the Committee on Standards in Public Life and in 2009 was appointed to the Secretary of State's Advisory Panel on Judicial Diversity. In 2005, she was awarded the US Law and Society International Prize for distinguished scholarship and she holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Keele, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Kingston.

Hazel was chair of the Public Legal Education and Support (PLEAS) task force and was chair of the Advisory Panel for research on Family Advice and Information for the Legal Services Commission.

She served for eight years as deputy chair and then chair of the Economic and Social Research Council's Research Grants Board and in 2008 she was elected Honorary Master of the Bench of Gray's Inn.

Hazel Genn is a leading authority on civil justice and has published widely in the field including Meeting Legal Needs? (1981), Understanding Civil Justice (1997) and Tribunals for Diverse Users (2006). She is author of companion volumes Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (1999), and, with Alan Paterson, Paths to Justice Scotland: What Scottish People Do and Think About going to Law (2001), which report the findings of two major national surveys into public use of and attitudes to the legal system.

She was one of the team leading the Nuffield Foundation's Inquiry on Empirical Legal Research and is one of the authors of the final report Law in the Real World: Improving our Understanding of How Law Works, published in November 2006. In November/December 2008 she delivered the 2008 Hamlyn Lectures on civil justice.

The Rt. Hon. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury was appointed as Master of the Rolls in 2009 and then became President of the Supreme Court in October 2012.

He was called to the Bar in 1974 and was made a Queen’s Counsel (QC) in 1987. He became a Bencher for Lincolns Inn in 1993. His first judicial appointment was as a Recorder from 1990 until 1996 when he was appointed a High Court judge in the Chancery Division and was then the Supervisory Chancery Judge for the Midland, Wales and Chester and Western Circuits 2000 - 2004.

In January 2004 he was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal and led an investigation for the Bar Council into widening access to the barrister profession. In 2007 he was made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and created a life peer as Baron Neuberger of Abbotsbury in the county of Dorset.