Introduction

This book is intended as a guide to colleagues who are new to their roles as legal academics or new to particular aspects of their roles. This book is not a rule book or even a definitive how to guide but rather an attempt to share our experience, and the experience of colleagues, with you. We hope that in doing so you can build on that experience and perhaps avoid making some of the mistakes and falling into some of the traps we did. We have tried to do justice to the fact that there is no typical legal academic and no typical role. We all do slightly different things in slightly different institutions and we all have slightly different backgrounds, career paths and ambitions.