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A Message from our Founder I am delighted to share a few words to introduce our December 2024 edition of the O Shaped newsletter, The Oracle. I left a full time General Counsel role in April 2022 to work with and showcase people who wanted to make a difference in the legal industry. The best barometer of success at the year end is whether we have achieved that in the prior 12 months. The answer for 2024 is a resounding yes. The O List Perhaps the 2024 highlight was celebrating the O List for the first time in February, bringing together those who are making the legal profession better every day by being brilliant human beings. And, in case you have missed it, we have just announced the 2025 O List which has once again exceeded our expectations in terms of the quality of nominations and, of course, the amazing 14 O Listers who make up the O List 2025. RFPs We also recently launched the O Shaped RFP Toolkit, downloaded over 150 times in the first two weeks following launch. Open to all, it has the potential to drive a more cohesive, joined up legal profession and we will be sharing much more on this in 2025 to keep up the momentum. As a starter, we are hosting an industry-wide RFP webinar on 30th January 2025 where we will be joined by Heather Key, Chief Legal Counsel at Serco who recently completed an O Shaped tender. See here for more details and sign up. Future Board and Aspiring Lawyers The Future Board has gone through change this year with our superb Chair, Katie Barker, stepping down earlier in the year and Harry Mellor taking over. He has brilliantly led a review and refresh of the Board leading to 5 new members joining in October. We are so excited for the new members and the potential for the board. See more below. Separately, we started hosting our Bi-monthly In-House Paralegal, Apprenticeship and Trainee webinars with Browne Jacobson earlier in the year. They have been a great success and the community is continuing to grow. We plan to have our first in person meet up in the new year. If you work in-house and are, or have in your team, a paralegal, apprentice or trainee, and would like to join this community, please get in touch with Emma at emma@oshaped.com. Our Partners We have continued to work closely with our partners in legal education at BPP, COLP, BARBRI, The Law Society of Scotland and Damar Training as well as our law firm partners Browne Jacobson and Dentons. Your support remains the foundation of all that is good about O Shaped and we are very proud of these relationships. Our Work With In-House Teams We have worked with some of the most progressively minded in-house legal and compliance teams around including Lenovo, TikTok, Mace, Capital One, Metro Bank, Elysium, WTW, William Grant & Sons, PZ Cussons, Centrica, DHL and many more, often in joint workshops with our law firm partners who have taken collaborative law firm/client relationships to the next level and beyond. Even all of this was eclipsed by the ground-breaking programme the O Shaped faculty co-delivered with the people capability team at Standard Chartered Bank, embedding O Shaped with the 650 strong global Legal and Co Sec team at the bank. Whatever happens in the future, this is a career highlight and set the tone for how we can bring O Shaped learning to a much wider audience whilst maintaining our ‘people first’ ethos. Thanks! Thank you to everyone who has made 2024 so special, but especially to our wonderful Future Board and Steering Board as we move into new phases with both of them and our Chair Catherine Baker who remains a rock of support to me and the O. More of the same please in 2025. Enjoy the Oracle.
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