LIDW: Getting to the church on time

Has London International Disputes Week overtaken the International Bar Association’s annual conference as the world’s largest assembly of lawyers? With 9,000 registrations claimed for LIDW25 this week, it certainly looks like it. 

Success brings its own problems, however. Dear old Legal London lacks venues capable of accommodating much more than a few hundred at a time, so Monday’s opening reception was hosted in Southwark Cathedral (pictured).

Alas, dispute resolution lawyers are a punctual lot – perhaps a consequence of recording your life in six-minute increments – so the thousands who turned up on the dot at 7pm had to queue around the block before being filtered in through a single door. At least a couple of colleagues gave up after an hour and were last seen heading for the delights of Borough Market. 

Luckily, it was a pleasant evening for that sort of thing and the catering was worth the wait. So too was the welcome address from the dean of Southwark Cathedral, the Very Reverend Dr Mark Oakley, who worked in a good word for the resolvers of disputes in an age when ‘heightened self-promotion coupled with lessened self-awareness’ is the order of the day. 

Whoever could he be talking about? The dean also made a point of welcoming the many US visitors, name-checking John Harvard, who was baptised in the cathedral in 1607. Four centuries on, the institution of which Harvard was the first benefactor is itself in need of dispute resolution.