Embracing Diversity, Upholding Equity: Legal ID 2025 Recap
This year marked a turning point for Legal ID. Our team has blossomed into a multifaceted initiative encompassing events, publications, podcasts, and community outreach, all united by a singular commitment to fostering a more inclusive legal profession. As we look back on our achievements, we do so with immense gratitude for our team, our guests, our attendees, and everyone who believed in the power of diversity to reshape the legal landscape.
Our efforts for the year culminated in being named runners up at the Law Ambassador Program Showcase Night 2025. It was an incredibly proud moment for our team, and a testament to the hard work that each and every one of our members poured into the initiative. We invite you to celebrate our milestones with us as we reflect on a year of impact and connection.
Our flagship event: The Legal Kaleidoscope
On August 5th, Legal ID proudly hosted our first-ever physical event since the conception of the team in 2021. The Legal Kaleidoscope ran as a workshop and networking event, endeavouring to celebrate diversity and inclusion in law. Our sold-out event brought together law students and legal professionals of various backgrounds for an evening of dialogue, connection, and reflection.
The night began with warm introductory addresses from our hosts Milica Vlajic and Jade Teoh, followed by insights from Akshat Nayak and Ai-Vy Nguyen on Legal ID’s mission and the vision behind Legal Kaleidoscope. Attendees were then introduced to our panelists – Kami Mogeni from MinterEllison, Ruchika Bilagi Sandesh from Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Amber Li from Align Law, and Amir Bahrami from Clayton Utz – who all brought a wealth of experience and diverse perspectives from across the legal profession.
Rather than a traditional panel discussion, our participants engaged in two interactive workshops – Mythbusting and Wins, Woes, Wisdom, where attendees were split into small groups to engage in direct, personal conversations with the panelists. This unique format not only fostered open dialogue, but also created spaces for genuine connections between attendees and panelists.
The Legal Kaleidoscope was more than an event – it was a beginning. As our first major initiative, it marked Legal ID’s commitment to creating inclusive spaces, elevating diverse voices, and challenging the status quo within the legal field. We aim to host more innovative and larger-scale workshops by collaborating with different stakeholders in the future to further broaden our reach and deepen the impact. Particularly, we hope to expand our outreach by inviting guests from a variety of legal careers – from commercial law, to government, courts, NGOs and so on. Our ultimate goal is to create a legal community where equity is not an aspiration, but a standard – and where everyone feels seen, heard and empowered.
On paper: Our ‘Footnotes’ publications
This year, we also launched Legal ID’s first publications series – a collection of articles featuring insights from various guests, based on our monthly themes. This year, our themes were as follows:
June: Pride (in celebration of Pride Month)
July: Pathways and Possibilities (spotlighting that a career in law is far from linear)
August: Beyond Borders (discussing all things international)
September: Redefining Success (inspirational stories surrounding building success on one’s own terms)
Our Publications team, consisting of Adelheid Ye and Ananya Goswami, engaged deeply with the personal and professional journeys of distinguished legal practitioners ranging from commercial to family law. Each interview conducted and article written became a window into how legal theory transforms into lived experience, revealing the many ways in which principle and practice intersect across diverse areas of law.
A key experience of the Publications Team was learning about different practice areas, career trajectories, and professional approaches. Our exposure to this opportunity broadened our understanding of the legal landscape and highlighted the great diversity in pathways available within the profession. Our newfound knowledge was extended to our audience, and equally fulfilling was the opportunity to connect students at Monash with established professionals through the medium of our articles. This connection created a meaningful bridge between ambition and experience, enabling students to access guidance that might otherwise feel distant. These interactions reflected Legal ID’s core commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion by showcasing the varied voices and experiences that define modern legal practice. In the future, we hope to continue to build on Footnotes, including a higher frequency of article releases featuring guests from different legal occupations.
Footnotes is accessible here: https://www.legalid-lap.com/publications
Building our brand: Marketing
Guided by Legal ID’s mission to ‘Embrace Diversity [and] Uphold Equity’, the marketing team, consisting of Ming Chen, Adriene Alvaran and Kanishka Sammi, began the year by launching a comprehensive rebrand. We overhauled the Legal ID website and Instagram, carefully crafting a vibrant brand identity that truly reflects the community we serve. We then launched our LinkedIn page to catalogue our growing impact. Over the following 6 months, our consistent content strategy spotlighting our Legal ID Footnotes publication, Voices on Balance podcast and the Legal Kaleidoscope event culminated in an impressive tenfold growth in our social media presence.
The highlight of our year was the marketing campaign for our flagship Legal Kaleidoscope industry event. The multi-phase plan began with aesthetic posters that mirrored the ‘kaleidoscope’ of opportunities in law. In the weeks leading up to the event, we built anticipation by posting weekly introductions to our panellists. These efforts resulted in a sold out event of over 40 Monash Law students, alongside four guest speakers. During the event, we captured professional photos and videos, which we then transformed into Legal ID Talks, a four-part interview series. In these interviews, panellists and attendees shared insightful perspectives on DEI, covering topics such as diversity of thought, advice for first-year law students from underrepresented backgrounds and personal experiences of legal diversity.
The Legal ID Marketing Team is incredibly proud of this year’s achievements. We look forward to seeing future Legal ID teams evolve our content and underscore non-commercial career pathways in law.
Say it louder: Our ‘Voices on Balance’ podcasts
Another initiative brought to fruition under Legal ID’s 2025 team was a new podcast series, titled Voices on Balance. We began by speaking to Xiao Shan Saw, the International Student Officer at Monash Law Students' Society, in an episode titled "Home Away from Law School." The conversation explored the unique challenges of navigating law school as an international student – from adjusting to a new legal system and cultural environment to building community far from home. This highlighted the often-overlooked perspectives of international students and the importance of creating inclusive spaces that celebrate diverse journeys within the legal profession.
In another compelling episode of Voices on Balance, Legal ID sat down with Nurul Khan, Principal Lawyer at a family law firm, to discuss his transition from the Bangladeshi judiciary to the Australian legal landscape. He candidly shared the challenges of navigating different legal frameworks, cultural norms, and barriers to recognition that international lawyers face. Powerfully, he reframed these challenges as strengths, championing cultural competence – the ability to understand diverse perspectives and serve multicultural communities – as an invaluable asset that enriches the legal profession and fosters a more globally-minded approach to justice.
The Voices on Balance podcast episode for “Redefining Success: The Next Chapter in Law” brought together Kathryn Smith, Manager at LIV Young Lawyers, and Samira Lyndsey, Associate at Allens and Executive Member of LIV’s Young Lawyers Committee. The conversation opened with a critical examination of traditional ideas of success in law, which have often been tied to hierarchical progression, prestige, and long working hours. Both guests highlighted how these conventional measures are being re-evaluated in light of changing generational values, and that greater visibility of individuals succeeding across different practice areas, workplace structures, and lifestyles encourages a more inclusive and flexible definition of success.
Overall, our guests in each podcast offered a forward-looking perspective on the profession’s evolving culture. The discussion highlighted a collective shift toward recognising multiple forms of achievement, reflecting a broader commitment to balance, diversity, and individual fulfilment within the legal community.
Voices on Balance is accessible here: https://www.legalid-lap.com/podcasts
Student to student: The Door to Law
In pursuit of Legal ID’s 2025 objective to act as a platform for fostering conversations around cultural and gender diversity in the legal landscape, The Door to Law was a school visit event intended to extend such meaningful discourse to high school students who may be interested in studying law. By providing an opportunity to candidly discuss the law school experience to an underrepresented high school, Legal ID was committed to the vision of making legal education more accessible and inspiring the next generation of diverse legal practitioners.
The main feature of our interactive event was its game-based format, taking inspiration from the game show Jeopardy. In groups, students would take turns to select questions from a category and level to try and earn as many points for their team whilst gaining insights into the study of law. The topics for the categories were “Obscure Laws”, “Legal Lingo”, “Law School Experience” and “How does a court work?”. To conclude the event, we planned to have a panel consisting of our Legal ID committee members, providing firsthand insight into the rewarding experiences as a Monash Law student.
While we, unfortunately, were unsuccessful in hosting our school visit, the planning process reinforced our belief in the importance of outreach initiatives that bridge the gap between underrepresented communities and the legal profession. The Legal ID 2025 team is excited to see where the 2026 team will take The Door to Law!
Final remarks from our Team Lead, Akshat Nayak
As the Law Ambassador Program 2025 comes to a close, I have had the opportunity to reflect on the impact that Legal ID has had. While there is still a lot of work to be done, initiatives like ours prove that progress in this space is possible when driven by purpose. As an international student myself, initiatives like ours fill me with optimism and hope for a more equitable future and I am eager to see where it leads.
Legal ID was born out of a simple, but powerful idea – that identity matters in the legal industry. Whether it be cultural background, socioeconomic status, gender identity, or lived experiences, all of these aspects of identity have an impact on how individuals engage with the legal system – and how legal professionals serve the community at large. Our initiative strived to amplify the underrepresented voices in the law and challenge systemic barriers in order to cultivate a more inclusive and just legal system.
Through all of the above initiatives, I believe we did more than simply talk about diversity and inclusion, we built pathways and created a space for law students and legal professionals from diverse backgrounds to be heard and seen.
I want to extend my deepest gratitude to every team member, mentor, attendee and supporter who stood by our initiative and believed in our mission. Your support made our initiative what it is today – and this recognition belongs to all of you. Leading the Legal ID Team has been one of the highlights of my law school experience thus far, and I am so incredibly proud of each and every one of the talented individuals that came together to make this initiative happen. It has been an honour and a privilege to work on such a meaningful initiative and I am eager to see what Legal ID achieves in 2026 and beyond.
Written by Adelheid Ye, Akshat Nayak, Ananya Goswami, Jade Teoh, Justin Chan, Letishia Jong, Mimi Vlajić, Ming Chen and Ai-Vy Nguyen
Edited by Ai-Vy Nguyen