Legal Advice Centre Diary

This diary captures the Legal Advice Centre’s activities during the 2025–2026 academic year, celebrating the people, projects and moments that shape our work.

Week One

Welcome to the LSE Legal Advice Centre, where legal theory meets human reality and students discover legal practice bears very little resemblance to glossy courtroom dramas. They quickly learn that practising law involves significantly more paperwork and considerably less evidence tampering, though the coffee consumption remains impressively high.

The Legal Advice Centre is returning for its second year, following last year’s launch of the pilot programme, a milestone for the LSE Law School. The clinic’s first year delivered genuinely impressive numbers: 115 enquiries, 36 clients served, and not a single student abandoned ship mid-semester. Those are the kind of numbers that make everyone quietly pleased with themselves.

Diana Kirsch, the clinic’s brilliant Director, has returned with the kind of infectious enthusiasm that could power a generator. She has wonderfully ambitious plans that sound either visionary or dizzying, depending on how much sleep you’ve had.

I’m looking forward to welcoming our new cohort of Legal Advice Centre students. I had a busy summer of interviewing students and I was really impressed with their enthusiasm for our work. We’ve got some exciting new projects and we are pleased to be welcoming two new colleagues – our new Deputy Director Saher Osman and our Clinic Coordinator Behnia Naemi.

As a result of Diana’s tireless work, some exciting updates are underway.

The clinic is settling into its new home on the bright and airy eighth floor of the Cheng Kin Ku Building, allowing the students to meet their vitamin D quota. The new space deserves its own proper introduction. More on that soon.

The employment law clinic, which handled over half of last year’s cases, is continuing to expand to meet growing demand. New partnerships are also taking shape, alongside a brand-new Sustainability Law Clinic, because apparently, saving the planet has been added to Tuesday’s to-do list.

Amidst all of these changes, the Centre Diaries are our attempt to document what happens when law students encounter actual human problems in all their messy complexity. Think nature documentary, but the wildlife wears business casual and occasionally has an existential crisis about legal ethics. You’ll witness the delicate choreography of students learning to balance overwhelming compassion with professional judgment, a process roughly as straightforward as learning to parallel park in central London.

Each term follows its own theme, because law schools do love their organisation. To kick off the Diaries, the Autumn Term explores “Building a Clinic”, covering everything from what it takes to set up a clinic to digging into the work. The team is already off to the races, armed with unfettered determination and an impressive collection of highlighter pens.

Welcome to year two. The doors are ready to open, and there’s work to be done.