We were delighted to welcome an enthusiastic group of students to our online Diploma in Law and Collections Management last week. The silver lining of us not being able to get together in the same room this year was that students from as far and wide as Singapore, Australia and the UAE could more easily join – from the comfort of their own homes, of course. Well done to all for completing the week’s tuition – perhaps especially those who had to get up early or stay up late to be with us. Amazingly, there were few signs of fatigue (not that we detected!) and we all enjoyed lively and fascinating discussions on the wide variety of topics covered, students and tutors alike. Our grateful thanks to Becky Shaw and Fred Clark from Boodle Hatfield for their valuable contributions; it’s always so useful to hear about the issues arising for lawyers currently working in the art law field.

The course is aimed at those in the museums and galleries sector, and addresses areas as diverse as ownership of collections, museum ethics, copyright and insurance. Participants did an excellent job drawing on their ‘inner lawyer’ to try out being copyright and contract lawyers. Our moot, discussing some tricky copyright issues, might have felt a little unusual, as we addressed a sea of faces on our computer screens, but given the transition of many court proceedings to an online environment, maybe it wasn’t so very far away from the real life experience of litigants in the post-Covid world.

All that’s left now is for our students to complete their assessments, and we wish them all well with those.