Keynote speakers

We are pleased to welcome two fantastic keynote speakers to our Annual Conference: Alison Hook, and Eliza Easton.

Alison Hook is the co-founder of Hook Tangaza, a specialist legal sector research and advisory consultancy. She was previously the Director of International at the Law Society of England and Wales (2002-10), where she played a leading role in advocating for more open legal markets and working with government to develop an export promotion strategy for UK legal services. Alison is a member of the Advisory Board of the Ulster University Legal Innovation Centre, and carried out a study for Invest NI on the competitiveness of the Northern Irish legal cluster in 2013-14. She led a review of legal practitioner education and training for the Legal Services Regulatory Authority in Ireland (published 2018), is a consultant advisor to the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales and is a member of the Independent Review of Legal Services Regulation (UCL Centre for Ethics and Law). She is currently undertaking a research project for the Legal Services Board of England and Wales into global trends in the regulation of legal technology which will be published in May 2019.

Eliza Easton

Eliza is Head of Policy Unit, Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC), and Principal Policy Researcher, Nesta. She works with a team of multi-disciplinary researchers to analyse and develop policies for the creative economy, and then with policy-makers to see them enacted. Prior to joining Nesta, Eliza was part of the founding team of the Creative Industries Federation, a membership body for the creative industries. Recently, Eliza co-authored the PEC’s first published research on the subject of Creativity and the Future of Skills. The Creative PEC provides independent research and authoritative recommendations to aid the development of policies for the UK’s creative industries, contributing to their continued success. It is part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and funded through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. The PEC is led by Nesta and involves a consortium of UK-wide universities, comprising Birmingham; Cardiff; Edinburgh; Glasgow; Work Foundation at Lancaster University; LSE; Manchester; Newcastle; Sussex, and Ulster.