The law can only fulfill Its potential to deliver justice and protect rights with the help of a passionate and dedicated cadre of advocates. That’s why one of IWILAP’s primary goals is to inspire lawyers to advance the public interest and equip them with the necessary knowledge, capabilities, and opportunities to do so. IWILAP works with public interest advocates throughout their careers to achieve this goal.

IWILAP begins by sparking interest among law students and working to enhance legal education to be more responsive to social needs and reflective of professional ethics. IWILAP’s programs combine academic and practical training with mentoring and exposure to innovative strategies to equip young lawyers with the tools necessary to make a profound impact on their local communities.

IWILAP also provides opportunities to work in the public interest to seasoned, private-sector lawyers who provide pro-bono legal services voluntarily. Through its pro-bono strategy, IWILAP leverages significant resources from law firms and in-house legal departments of major corporations to assist NGOs and to supplement and support the work of full-time public interest lawyers.

The poor and socially vulnerable can only protect their rights If they can access the judicial mechanisms that serve them. That’s why IWILAP works to make systems of justice more effective and accessible by reforming legal aid, by developing pro-bono (or volunteer) legal practice in Uganda, and by promoting other innovative approaches to meeting the legal needs of the public.

IWILAP works in collaboration with partner organizations to engage ministries of justice in legal aid reform efforts, to provide comparative expertise, and to support the development of legal aid interest groups and coalitions among NGOs, human rights lawyers, judges, and bar association leaders. IWILAP assists NGOs in developing legal aid programs and works with universities to establish and strengthen legal aid-providing clinical programs based at law schools.
IWILAP works to make systems of justice more effective, accessible, and fair, in part by improving state-subsidized legal aid systems. In this effort, IWILAP collaborates with key stakeholders – national and local governments and bar associations – to design context-appropriate legal aid systems and allocate resources for the provision of legal aid and legal information.

IWILAP also engages NGO partners in legal aid reform processes and fosters the complementarity of state, private sector and NGO efforts in this realm.
IWILAP relies on a diverse set of methodologies and participatory processes to gather, analyze and disseminate data to assess current deficiencies in access to justice, highlight problems and needs and inform priorities, including undertaking comparative research studies and convening workshops and conferences.

IWILAP believes that law schools play a critical role in producing socially responsible and public interest-oriented lawyers, who are, in turn, essential to the delivery of justice and the protection of human rights. IWILAP advances innovative and comprehensive curriculum development and excellence in teaching so that law schools more effectively promote ethical values, develop broad analytical and problem-solving skills and provide knowledge of the social effects of the law.

IWILAP also seeks to identify, inspire, and assist reform-oriented leaders in legal education and to connect them to external constituencies within civil society and the private sector that support and benefit from improvements in legal education. To accelerate the process of reform, IWILAP utilizes studies, surveys, scholarly debate and stakeholder consultations to create a more active discourse about identifying and meeting educational needs both within the legal academe and in the broader public sphere.

Building on the continued success of previous years’ legal ethics training for law students, IWILAP in collaboration with the Law Schools, holds an annual “Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics in the International Legal Market” course. This is usually an intensive training that covers a range of topics including lawyer-client relationships, social responsibility, the role of pro bono, and confidentiality and conflict of interest issues.

Additionally, the course covers legal ethics among Ugandan judges and defense lawyers with one of the sessions dedicated solely to legal ethics and human rights issues. Practitioners with many years of experience in the legal field lead the course. To participate in the program, students from across Ugandan law schools submit essays, in English, on the subject of legal ethics. As a result, the workshop brings together students. On one hand, this geographic diversity perhaps signals improvements in the quality of the country’s law schools. On the other, it demonstrates a growing interest in ethics among future Ugandan lawyers.

The scope of Its outreach will further contribute to the popularization of legal ethics in our country and beyond, and the society at large will become more aware of the numerous challenges – and countless opportunities for growth, reform and innovation – that exist within the realm of legal ethics.” IWILAP and its partners are making every effort to make these wishes a reality.