The Centre for Professional Legal Education was established at Bond University in 2015 as ‘a community of legal educators, researchers, practitioners and administrators who collaborate in defining, understanding, and promoting best practice in the teaching of law, with an emphasis upon professional legal education and training, and understanding and responding to the changing nature of the legal services sector’. Our goals include being a leading contributor to research and scholarship about professional legal education and training and the changing nature of the legal services sector and being a leading designer and developer of high quality, innovative, personalised legal education and training programs and courses. The Centre’s members include more than 20 scholars from within the Faculty of Law at Bond as well as several external scholars and practitioners.

In 2015 the CPLE formally merged with the Centre for Legal Education (CLE). The CLE was originally established in 1992 and in its early years was extremely active, engaging in some important and impactful projects including studies into the career intentions of law students and the career destinations of law graduates. The CPLE inherited the CLE’s business name, its goodwill, and a set of legal education resources.

Since its formation, the CPLE and its members have produced a long list of journal articles, books, book chapters, textbooks and conference papers focussing upon legal education and training and the legal services sector, with a particular focus upon legal skills and professionalism, lawyer and law student wellness, the internationalisation of legal education, and the disruption of the legal services sector. It has led the development and delivery of innovative new programs and subjects in the areas of legal education, dispute resolution, personal and corporate insolvency, enterprise governance and animal law education (in collaboration with Voiceless). It has hosted several successful research events and symposia and publishes several journals on an ongoing basis including the Legal Education Review (in collaboration with the Australasian Law Teachers Association) and the Australian Journal of Clinical Education. Today the Centre is engaging in important research projects including research into the impact of emergent technologies on the teaching of core law subjects (in collaboration with the Legal Education Associate Deans Network), the development of an annual Law School Survey and Annual Report, research into clinical legal education (in collaboration with the Australian Pro Bono Centre), and research into therapeutic pedagogy, mediation artistry and the harmonising of legal learning.

We are both extremely proud of the Centre’s achievements to date and of its national reputation in the legal education and legal services sectors as a leader in professional legal education research and program design. We are looking forward to telling you more about the Centre and sharing with you the results of its work.