Bowman and Lim share the origin of the partnership and how it evolved
Last month, Anika Legal and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University announced that they would be furthering their years-long partnership with the launch of a landmark on-site office to help law students gain practical experience. Australasian Lawyer caught up with RMIT University School of Law dean Diana Bowman and Anika Legal CEO and co-founder Noel Lim; in the first part of this interivew, they discuss how the partnership came to be, and why it continues to go further.
How did the partnership come about?
Noel Lim: It was a while ago and definitely before Di started. We got in touch with RMIT in 2021, then we did a pilot and slowly built slowly built things from there over the years. It was not until this year or late last year that we moved into RMIT on site and had a multi-year agreement – constantly discussing with Di and the team about how we can grow the partnership even further. So it's been a long time coming, and we’re really excited about where it's going.
What was the initial idea, and how did it evolve to the point where you guys decided to do something on site?
Noel Lim: The Anika Legal clinic’s value proposition is that law students will be closer to the legal disputes than they could otherwise get. They are the ones doing all of the legal work and doing exactly what a lawyer would do, save for signing off.
So the initial pilot was I think six JD students from RMIT running cases, and from there, we continued working with RMRT every year and growing the numbers. And that's a big part of what the partnership currently is.
We place four intakes’ worth of RMIT law students as interns, and those students are actually supporting the clients to avoid homelessness or get repairs done to a potentially dangerous home. I guess there's more now that we're on site, and we've got students actually in the office and working together in that way. There's more potential for new things as well.
Diana Bowman: Even though RMIT Law is a very new law school – we’re less than one year old – we’ve had a tradition of teaching law for nearly two decades. Social justice has always been at the very heart of the DNA of the law school, and as we're moving into this new era of what legal education looks like, clinical education is key to actually creating confident, or I should say, graduating confident law students.
And we know the best way to build legal skills is through the clinical program, so having a high-tech clinical program in partnership with Anika is really ensuring that we are graduating students who are fit for purpose in today's legal ecosystem. We are looking at scale in terms of the work that Anika does, and the ability to have an in-house team in terms of having Anika in the building allows us to think about how we solve these pressing problems at scale using our fantastic students as the workhorses. It's an incredible opportunity for the law school itself, but also the students who are coming through RMIT Law.
Noel Lim: That's a great point from Di because I think [the reason] why this has always worked so well and why it's got such huge potential is because of the shared vision and values of social justice being at the core of both RMIT and Anika Legal, [along with] innovation and using technology so that you can have that extremely high quality legal education at scale.
What drew Anika Legal to work with RMIT specifically on this?
Noel Lim: From early on, we knew that we had this vision of every law student being able to get this premium experience and actually understand what it is like to be a lawyer while they're in law school. It's not just preparing them to learn all the skills – it does that as well – but it also gives them a sense of, “this is what my career would be like”, and law students can go in really aware and become more socially responsible in the process of supporting often vulnerable clients and renters through really tough legal disputes.
A lot of other universities – really, everyone these days – says they are for innovation, and what we've seen from RMIT is that they have the courage to back that up. Innovation means risks, but they are leaning into that and taking those risks. And that's why this partnership works.
