Professor Emeritus, Director Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

Avrom Sherr leads the operation of the Independent Peer Review of all legal aid work in England and Wales. He was Deputy Dean of the School of Advanced Legal Studies from 2011 to 2012 and Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies from 2004 to 2014. From 1995 he was the founding Woolf Professor of Legal Education, a research chair. He taught at the University of Warwick for 16 years, and was the first Alsop Wilkinson Professor of Law at the University of Liverpool. He qualified as a solicitor in 1974 and worked in commercial litigation at Coward Chance till 1980. From 1988 to 2012 he was also Director of Training at Macfarlanes.

Avrom Sherr's main research interests have been the provision of legal services, the development of legal education, the legal profession and ethics in professional work. He has also written in the areas of freedom of protest, discrimination relating to AIDS/HIV, issues of welfare rights provision within health care and carried out two projects on On-line Dispute Resolution. He is the principal architect of the system of assessment of legal competence known as Independent Peer Review. Since 2000 this has been used as the system for assessment of the quality of Legal Aid work in the UK, ensuring the quality of legal services received by the public, and he currently leads the operation of this work for England and Wales.

He is the founding Editor of the International Journal of the Legal Profession, was the project leader producing the seminal report "Willing Blindness" on regulation of the legal profession, and has coordinated a number of trans-European projects on legal ethics, money laundering, legal and accountancy practitioner defaults and discrimination. He was a member of the Legal Services Commission Quality Assurance Working Group and of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct. He was Chair of the Advisory Board & StrategyCommittee of the UK Centre for Legal Education, Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education and is now again Chair of the Hamlyn Trust. He is currently Chair of the Advice Quality Standards Project Committee. Recent work includes the Legal Education and Training Review funded by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board and the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, advising the Hong Kong Law Society on the future of qualification systems, advising the Legal Aid Board of Georgia and work with the National Legal Aid Centre of the Ministry of Justice in China.

His consultancy and research on law and policy has included leading and advising a Council of Europe Meeting on Legal Aid legislation and implementation for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and the Ukraine in December of 2015, and he has worked in China, New Zealand, South Korea, Chile, South Africa, Bulgaria, Turkey, Japan and Russia on Legal Aid policy and legislation.

He currently also works with the Save The Children UK, Research and Assesment Ethics Committee.