Join us as we take a deep dive into the technical revolution happening in the Irish Courts with Angela Denning. Angela has been the Chief Executive of the Courts since 2019, and she’s four years into a 10-year plan to make the courts accessible to everyone.  

So why should you be listening in?  

You can hear Rob and Angela discussing: 

• Angela’s background and career journey 

• The Century of Courts Conference  

• International expansion into Ireland  

• Advice for starting your own legal career 

• Accountability at the top of the courts system 

Transcript

Rob Hanna 00:00 

Welcome to the legally speaking podcast. I’m your host Rob Hanna. This week I’m delighted to be joined by Angela Denning Angela studied at Trinity College and as a qualified barrister. She also has IPA training and strategy and training. Angela has a wealth of experience in the court services in the probate office. And as a deputy master of the High Court. Angela also spent time dealing with the freedom of information requests and whistleblowing legislation at the Department of Public expenditure and reform. Angela was appointed chief executive of the court service in 2019. So a very big warm welcome, Angela. 

Angela Denning 00:37 

Thanks very much, Rob. Good to be here. 

Rob Hanna 00:39 

Oh, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Super excited for today’s chat. But before we go through all your amazing experiences, we do have a little customary question here on the legally speaking podcast, which is on a scale of one to 1010 being very real. What would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law? If you’ve seen it? 

Angela Denning 01:03 

The shoes are the right height, the ladies shoes at the right height Other than that, no, it’s not very real. 

Rob Hanna 01:12 

Fashion 10 Law zero. And we move swiftly on to talk all about you. So to begin with Andrew, would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and career journey? 

Angela Denning 01:23 

Well, I when I finished in school, I went to Trinity College to do computer science. Then I left college at the time of recession in Ireland. So everybody went on the dole, as I did. And I went off and did desktop publishing. So I worked for it was called buy and sell Ireland’s free ads paper at the time, like small ads, where people could sell their cars and all that kind of thing work for them for a bit. And then I got a job with the civil service at the end of 1995. And I came to work in the High Court in the big the largest public office in the High Court, which is the central office to take where you take in all the civil documents for all the cases. So I was there a couple of years, and I was sent to the king’s ins, to do the to do law at night qualified as a barrister. At that stage, I’d moved to the probate office, that my job there was personal applications. So instead of using a lawyer to do probate after somebody had died, you come in to do the application yourself. And I still say that was my favourite job the most rewarding job because I was dealing directly with people and you got, you got to deal with them from start to finish. So from the day they rang up to say, Can I have an application for them until they left the office with that run to probate. So it was a really rewarding job. And I loved that. I had finished the insert that stage like a promotion again. So I was sent back to where I came from. And I went back to the High Court as a registrar. And I was registered to the master of the high court for a few years, which is really busy list. It’s all the procedural work to do with the High Court the civil list. So I learned a lot there. And then I got promoted again. And I went to the non jury list, the non jury judicial review list. So I was kind of list manager there for a long number of years. And then I was appointed deputy minister of the High Court. And I did that for probably six years, really, really enjoyable, grateful. And every day. I know they called me Judge Judy, the practitioners called me Judge Judy bush. Yeah, it was it was great fun. I suppose the background that I had common from that administer since I did the work. It really, it made it easy for me because I knew the procedures very well I knew the paperwork very well. And then from my perspective, it was all about moving cases along because you’re very conscious that when people see a bundle of files on a desk, actually there’s a family or a person behind every one of those. So it’s about moving those cases along, I tried to eliminate delay in cases. And then I got a little bit bored. And I suppose my my brain had kind of stopped working almost at that stage after a period of time during the same thing. I decided to go back to college again, I did a master’s in leadership and strategy at that stage. So that kind of, you know, gave me a different perspective on things. And I thought, God, I want to do something different chair and I’d applied for, you know, to move internally within the court service, but that wasn’t available. So I took the job, but I left and I went to that evil Department of Public expenditure and reform says the department in Ireland that gives out the money or not, and certainly the department that holds everybody to account for the money that’s spent on public services in Ireland. So I went up there and that was all about the job. There was a lot about government reform. So lobbying ethics, freedom of information, open data, data sharing, and when I kind of look afterwards, I thought, well, what’s the common thread here, it was all about public trust and government. So it was all of the functions that kind of would give the public trust in government and how government dealt with them and with their money, and so on. So that was really, really interesting. I absolutely loved that job. I was there for about a year and a half. And then the job was advertised SEO with court service. And I was lucky enough to get to be appointed. I was at a judge’s retirement a couple of weeks ago, and she said, she had the best job in Ireland. And I thought to myself, No, you’re wrong, I think I have, yeah, I’m really lucky to be here. And it’s great job. You can kind of change the world every day. 

Rob Hanna 05:41 

And richly deserved and just listening through there of everything that you’ve achieved, you know, I’m just so proud that we’ve managed to get you on the show to kind of unpack all that wisdom. Because you know, you’ve had so many tremendous roles that you say you thoroughly enjoyed. And a large part of what we’re trying to create on the legally speaking podcast is to try and inspire people to have more fulfilling legal careers, and get the information that they need to hopefully make better educated career decisions. So on that, then in terms of giving people an understanding who might be less familiar with the the Irish court system, could you explain a little bit how that works in Ireland, and perhaps some of the key differences from the court system in England and well, if at all? 

Angela Denning 06:20 

I would think there are very few differences. The laws the same, pretty much, it’s interchangeable, almost, scale is different. So we have 12 169 staff across about 51 offices nationwide, very diverse in terms of population size. So Dublin, Metropolitan District, the city is 1.3 million people kilronan, in the Aran Islands is a couple of 100 people, but we have to have court there, three or four times a year. So like very diverse population, areas of the country that are poorly served in terms of you know, just geography is difficult. Then Ireland, I suppose, has changed so much over the last number of years. The last census tells us that three quarters of a million people, so we’ve population of 5.2 million now, which has grown significantly, significantly, in the last 20 years, two quarters of a million people don’t speak English or Irish at home. So for us, that’s a that’s a challenge. Just in terms of people’s understanding on I suppose where we are the court service, you know, we do the administrative side. So as I say, we get the judges, right, we do everything on to the point where the judge sits on the bench, the judge takes over at that stage. And as soon as the judge walks off the bench we take over again. So we do all the list preparation. This, the staff, the management, the administration, provide the buildings, provide all the services that go along with it, because court isn’t just about what goes on in the courtroom. It’s everything around it. And I suppose if I looked back, we were probably underfunded for a large number of years, the money that did come went into buildings that was very necessary. The average age of an Irish courthouse is 162 years, there’s a fax for Trivial Pursuit sometime into the future. Very old buildings, it’s usually you know, the the large imposing building on the main street of a town. Everybody wants to keep those buildings, but they’re very difficult to manage. They’re difficult to repair. They’re costly, they’re all grade one listed. So you have all of that along with it. And then of course, user expectations nowadays are different. We have a large population of people who in the last census said that they had disabilities, for example, providing access to to those people to court is difficult, particularly if you think of the Old Courthouse with, you know, 50 steps up the front of courthouses 150 or 200 years ago weren’t built to be accessible. They were built to be imposing on I suppose that’s the challenge that we have now that people’s expectations are different. So yeah, I would say in terms of the law, it’s kind of the same. We have 193 judges, as of today, that’ll probably increase again. So we there’s a programme of work underway at the moment. The judicial planning Working Group reported last year, there was a recommendation for 25% increase in Judges over the course of two years. So the first tranche of judges arrived, the end of 2023. And we’re expecting another 20 this year. So of course, that expansion. Of course, work means that everything we do expands, it’s very much demand driven the work we do so, you know, if this year, you never know what the work is going to be about. You know, crime kind of stays steady. Family Law is growing somewhat. But you never know what where the peaks and troughs are going to come from. We very much react to what’s going on in society. So if You know, if somebody’s makes a dodgy brand new car, everybody’s going to be so and because of those cars in three years time, it’s that simple. 

Rob Hanna 10:08 

Yeah, yeah. And things going through my head of all the diesel emissions as well. And all of those interesting cases, okay, it’s fair to say No two days are the same. It’s a huge role that you have. But think back to when you were first appointed. Chief Executive of courts of service, what did you set out to address and, you know, holding yourself accountable? How do you feel you are performing against that?  

Angela Denning 10:31 

I suppose the, it was almost easy for me. And I don’t say that lightly. The court service had been the subject of a capability review, the Department of Public expenditure had conducted. So it was a review to see how the service was structured and how it dealt with the demands. And there were some pretty awful findings in that report. The main one being the technology had been underfunded, and was not in not fit for purpose. So for example, we couldn’t have done this four years ago. The technology I don’t think would have stood up to us, when I took over our IT. Landscape, if you want to call it that was pretty poor. We had been underfunded for a large number of years. So the first thing I looked at was the structure of the management team, and what we needed in order to deliver for the future. So I restructured their hearts achievement Information Officer and set about them putting the proper structure in place for it. And that’s been the, I suppose my main challenge for the last four years. And I would say also, the main success, you know, in a way I was unlucky, but also lucky COVID Hit within six months of me getting the job. I kind of took the fear out of me in the beginning, I think I did have that kind of fear, oh god, why did they give me this job? What am I supposed to be doing here. And, you know, COVID, almost made it made it easy. It made it really clear as to what our purpose was. I have to say our staff here are absolutely fantastic. That sense of purpose during COVID was extraordinary. But we simply weren’t kitted out at the time in order to deliver. So, you know, we didn’t have enough laptops. We didn’t have remote IT system. We had, we had a system that we use to take evidence from witnesses from abroad. And we had to repurpose that. And in three weeks get remote courts up and running. But we did. And we’re still using it, we have a proof of concept out at the moment to replace it. But it that I suppose that’s the territory that we’re in it was about the IT infrastructure, and starting with our own internal capability. So once we got the shape on that, then we were able to start at pace to roll out the change. And that’s been really, really exciting. And it’s absolutely been brilliant. You know, every member of staff, we did a desktop refresh the year before last. So every member of staff now has exactly the same kit, same laptop, it’s made things much easier. Everybody’s using the same mobile phones, it’s meant then that in terms of our how we work, flexibility, all of that it’s completely transformed the way we can work. You know, we’ve read weather alerts, it has very little impact. Now other than a court building, closing, it has very little impact on the work because people can work from home, they can literally take their laptop and go. We’ve done a lot of work on our Wi Fi. So our infrastructure infrastructure, we’ve moved to cloud in the name for a lot of our work that’s helped us in terms of security as well, because I don’t think we could have kept our our network secure the way we were previously. We’ve done a lot of work on the cybersecurity and a huge amount of work. We established a data unit the year before last, and a huge amount of work in terms of our data, both the quality of how we manage it. And now we’re actually starting to get for the first time management reports. So I’ve been operating for four years, walking around buildings, just looking at what’s on the shelf and gone, they’re busy or they’re not. Whereas now I can actually get figures. And that’s been fantastic as well, because those that data then helps the rest of the justice sector in terms of interoperability and also for policymaking, you know, to have facts and figures that you can rely on. And I think that’s one of the shifts that we’ve made. I kind of set about modernising the court service in Ireland. And one of the shifts that we’ve made is using evidence rather than hearsay, which is banned in legal terms, rather than hearsay to make decisions. Previously, just decisions I think would have been made, whoever shouts the loudest tends to get their way. Whereas now we go back and look at the evidence for everything, regardless of what the decision is about. So if it’s, you know, do I do up a courtroom in one town or in another, it’s based on evidence, rather than local councillors, or anybody else making the most noise. And I think that’s kind of shifted how we go about our work here. It’s made it really easy. In a way, it’s very clear. And I think what the other change that we made was, we’ve put the court shoes are at the heart of absolutely everything. So if it doesn’t improve things for court users, we don’t do it. And I think that has been transformative, it’s a very easy message to sell, in terms of both looking for funding, looking for support. And it is that thing about making the entire system built in the system around the court shoes are. So I look at the things we’ve done over the last few years, we’ve changed the information on our website, our website, oh, my god, four years ago, you couldn’t, I worked in the system, and I couldn’t find stuff on it, it was really, really hard to navigate, not very intuitive. So we’ve gone about that kind of user centred design. And we started with the website and our family law information, we realised, for example, that almost half the people involved in family law aren’t represented by solicitors that were turning up in court not realising the implications of what they were looking for. They didn’t understand the range of orders that were available. They didn’t understand the implications of you know, I think some people thought that, you know, you could come in and just ask for a divorce, and the judge would do all the work for you, they didn’t realise what was involved and what the implications of a divorce are, that, you know, it affects your home, your children, your pension, all of that. So we’ve tried to improve that information, so that people have a better understanding. And well, so far, the evidence is that people are coming to court better prepared. And actually, people are more inclined to hire solicitors because they are to try to get legal aid, because they realise what they’re getting themselves into. And I think that’s part of the that’s part of the of the difference. You know, everybody kind of comes to court with the diff different set of circumstances, what they need to understand what the court can do for them, that huge amount of people in the country who don’t understand that there is a legal solution to the problem that they have. And finding that out is about access to information. And if the information is unintelligible, it’s no use to us. So put a lot of effort into plain English, a lot of effort into making things simple and clear, more navigable for people. We now know people are spending longer on our website on the web pages actually reading them. Whereas before they would have skipped through the entire district court family law system section in a minute or a minute and a half. Now they’re spending about 20, nearly 20 minutes there. So at least people are engaging with it, and reading the information. And that’s what’s important. It’s about the person and the person at the end of them absorbing the information. I think that’s the bit So that’d be the big changes really, that I’ve made. Now, look, there’s a lot more to do God over a list of my long.  

Rob Hanna 18:33 

Well, I was gonna I was going to say, because firstly, I love everything there. And I love that your mindset is embracing technology for good to improve maybe that access to justice gap, you know, lots of things that we support, clear support, of course, and many within our community. I love that you’re always pushing pushing forward. And, you know, I think in one of your recent interviews in the Law Society Gazette, or Ireland, you know, you say, the court of public opinion, you discuss the use of technology within courts, no matter what technology we use in the future has to work for everyone. It has to be accessible for everyone and highly intuitive. There’s a real demand from solicitors, and particularly young solicitors to use technology. So I think that really backs up everything that you’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve with the modern fresh, you know, a needed approach. So yeah, to dive a bit deeper, but I think you have that 10 year strategic plan that’s been set out for the service, you know, what else do you hope to address as part of this 10 year plan? Sort of, you know, four years or so in? 

Angela Denning 19:33 

Well, I suppose. You know, every every core chooser goes well, what’s in it for me? And for professionals? What’s in it for them? And I think there’s one of the things we’re doing is we’re building a single case management system for all courts work. So we’ve started already. Last October, we had a it was a momentous day, we push a 30 year old system and the high court To bed and replaced it. So we now have different blocks of work on the new system. We’re moving Circuit Court family law work over at the moment. But the next step of that will be to build a practitioner portal. So we’re trialling with some solicitors outside Denton County, Calvin at the moment, online failure divorce. So start end to end, the vision is end to end services for anybody who’s using the courts that you’ll be able to, from start to finish, start your case, do all the things you need to be able to do pay your fees, print orders, find out what time the case is listed at, you know, apply for an adjournment online, perhaps sometime in the future, end to end services. And the idea is that you would have that for all case types. And it’s to make, so we’re we’re starting with divorce. Once we get the solicitors onto the solicitors portal, then we’re going to build a judicial portal. So we’ll have three views at the same system, we’ll have the staff view, the practitioner view and the judges view. And that’s that’s the dream in terms of technology to be able to get us to there, that’s, you know, in order to get to there, we have to get our infrastructure writer to get our data, right, we’re doing a huge job at the moment taking data out of a whole load of old systems, pulling it all into this giant data lake and cleaning it up so that we can then use it. But I think at the end of the 10 years, I’d like to see a court system that is more intuitive for people that people have more information about so they understand better the system that they can access digitally, if that’s what they choose to do, I’m very conscious of the digital divide. You know, in the last census here, 96% of people said they use the internet, and of those 96. And other 96% said they use it daily. So the digital divide isn’t perhaps as big as people think it is. And if we make our system simple enough to use, and make our forms simple enough to use, that’s a real challenge. Our our paperwork is very convoluted. It’s kind of grown legs over the years. And that’s been difficult to manage. But very recently, we have 40, I think it’s 41, or two district court forms, distilled down to 12, very simple, clear forms, and they will go before the district court rules committee very shortly. That’s a game changer, both in terms of technology, but also in terms of the people using the system. And then I suppose from my staff perspective, the the court system is growing at pace. And the challenge I have on the staff side, is to train people quick enough. Younger people than me don’t stay in their jobs forever, they kind of come and go and they they like to move more often. At the moment, our staff are staying enrolled about three, three and a half years, you’re just about have them trained up and have you know, everybody has a good understanding of the job when they want to move again. And I think that’s a challenge for us. And it’s how to get people upskilled quicker. The jobs we have are very technical. It’s how to use technology to help people with the training. And actually, we’ve seen that we moved over to teams, just the end of the year before last. And what we now see is our staff are using teams to help with training and queries and all that kind of thing. So we have webinars in the mornings before court starts, the team’s chat is hugely popular. And it’s mainly like if you’re a registrar and coach, traditionally, you were stuck in court at lunchtime, you couldn’t ask for help. Now you can send a team’s chat and go somebody’s after coming in here with this. Does anybody know the answer? Or does anybody know what I need to do? Or how do I draft this warrant? Whatever it might be. So we’re seeing a big change there. So I suppose back to your question, at the end of the 10 years, what do I want to see, I want to see that interoperability. I want to see people having the choice to use digital if they want. I don’t want to see people having to come to court offices anymore to get a form or to fill out a form. I want them to be able to do that from home. We one of the things we did do over the last couple years ago, we launched a jury portal. So people who get a jury summons can either have a QR code, and they can reply to the jury summons using the QR code. And then we can contact people and say no, you don’t need to come on whatever day and all of that. We have a large uptake on that without much of a push at all, but 50% uptake already, and I suppose that’s been really showed off that appetite. But when we went back and spoke to jurors who answered by paper and we said Why did you choose the paper, some of them said simply, I’ve no Wi Fi at home. Some of them said, You gave us an envelope. And we’d like to go to the local when I was going to the post office anyway, so I was passing the post office. So I say don’t use the envelope. But I suppose it has shown us that people still want options. They want the option to do paper, but they also want to do things online. And I suppose my job is to make sure that people have as many options as possible that we don’t, like, you know, it’s traumatic enough for people to have to go to court on the days that have to go to court without having to go and queue and go to court offices, in order to do the paperwork part. I think if we can take that burden off, people got to be real help, and particularly off practitioners. COVID, has really shown us that legal practitioners don’t want to travel out if they can at home, if they can work from home, they’re very happy. And the demands, particularly from the solicitor solicitors has been huge, for more remote access. And for more online working, be that forums or whatever. So if once we get that system, complete end to end, I think that’ll really help professionals. 

Rob Hanna 26:11 

And it’s tremendous. I mean, this is a huge thing that you’re working on. So you know, I will ask at the end where people can go and find out more particularly about the open data portal, it’s very clear that you are passionate about simplifying the legal process. You know, mentor said to me, I say all this on the show, if you confuse people, you lose people, I think really keeping things super, super easy. So you almost like my potluck and understand that I think you’re going to get an increase in engagement. And everyone’s going to understand and also really understand, you know, this is serious stuff. Typically people aren’t coming here for something that potentially isn’t very personally, you know, could affect their whole livelihoods. And, you know, having these systems in place that are thoroughly simplified, so everyone can thoroughly understand this. So important. So I tip my hat to you in terms of the great work you and the team are doing on that. And I want to talk a little bit about some of the developments of law firms establishing their offices in places like Dublin and cork, because we’ve seen a bit of a trend on that, you know, how is the Irish court service supporting firms coming from abroad? 

Angela Denning 27:11 

Well, it’s, it sounds a bit funny, but we don’t really, you know, we treat everyone the same. So it’s very much like, I think many of the firm’s that are coming from abroad, it’s corporate work, you know, corporate work. So it’s mainly High Court work that they’re involved with, so on the commercial and the Chancery side of the house. So it’s mergers and acquisitions. It’s all up. So absolutely, we’ve put more resources into the commercial side of thing. But that’s demand driven again, the fact that there are, you know, we have a lot of multinationals headquartered in Ireland, and they choose Ireland as the place where they like to litigate. And I suppose the the establishment of the, the commercial courts in Ireland about 20 years ago, did support that. It’s given people, you know, the guarantee of speedy access to a judge to resolve disputes. And I think that’s one of the things that has encouraged firms to come to Ireland. So you know, this project to kind of a government project called Ireland for law, and we do support that. But at the same time, you know, if, if in the morning firms decided to come to Ireland to do, I don’t know, small claims work, we’ll see support that equally, it’s we followed the demands almost, or we tried to predict the demand and ensure that we have the resources in place to meet that. So very much the but I do think a lot of the firms that have set up here, they have their eye on that commercial type work. And that’s all about the commercial courts on the Chancery list. And it’s about always having enough judges in that list. And then having the to the train staff to support that to make sure that the case is get on as quickly as possible. And we have a big we’re building a courtroom downstairs here in this building, actually, at the moment for a big aircraft leasing case, the planes that were grounded at started the war, and Ukraine. So we have 13 parties to that case due to start on the fourth of June. And the builders are happily banging away downstairs trying to get the courtroom ready for that. It’s the biggest like physically biggest case we have ever dealt with in the country. 200 practitioners, I’m told in that case. 

Rob Hanna 29:38 

So that’s going to be a biggie and talking of biggies. You recently attended a century of courts conference at Dublin Castle. So the event was being held to mark a centenary of the Court of Justice Act 1922. So could you tell us the significance of this act, please? 

Angela Denning 29:55 

Well, the the Act established the Irish court system so previous Mostly we were parts of the the UK and we operated on the British system. And actually after the Civil War here, we had an interregnum period for year and a half, two years for the judges who had previously been appointed by our archenemy in England stayed on. So we had what were called the dole courts, which were they the Irish courts that had kind of been established during the Civil War. And then we had the traditional established courts. And everybody kind of agreed that rather than have anarchy, we just let the judges who’ve previously been appointed by the British stay on and continue to do their jobs. So I thought that was a very pragmatic response at the time, but then in 1924, we got our own court system. So we got our own Supreme Court Constitutional Court. The district court was established for the first time, the circuit court, the predecessor of that was already there. But it was, you know, I suppose it was a mark of the country, taking its first giant step. To kind of mark independence from Britain. I think that along with there was another piece of legislation at the time, the ministers and secretaries Act, which established the civil service, that separate Irish civil service. So two pieces of legislation that have actually stood the test of time, there have been very few changes to them in the 100 years. So yeah, it was it was really important that we’d mark, It’s extraordinary to think that we’re still working in same buildings, as our predecessors worked in 100 years ago, my that my predecessor worked and, you know, on the system hasn’t changed that much. Now, I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I think it’s, I think it shows that were very steady. And I suppose it really demonstrates how the common law works. You know, that thing of tradition. And it’s all based on what went before and the change happens very, it’s slow and steady and incremental change. And I suppose that that implementation of the building of a new court system, like when you think of it, the Four Courts, so the main courthouse in Dublin here, that was blown up in 1922. So at the time that the Act came in the courts were working on just Dublin Castle, which had previously been the headquarters of the the British in Dublin. So it is extraordinary, really, when you look at, yeah, 100 years on, a lot has changed. But at the same time, I think the fundamentals have stayed the same. And when you go back, and you look at the basis of that legislation, you know, the short title on the act, it was about providing access to justice, and 100 years later, nothing’s changed. That’s what our modernization programme is about. So it really is it’s extraordinary that the fundamentals have stayed, the values have stayed the same the whole way through.  

Rob Hanna 33:04 

Yeah, and it’s a really, really important point, isn’t it to sort of say, you know, and I think it’s access to justice is something we’re all trying to push for, for good. Angela, you’ve had an impeccable career, you’ve shared so many amazing things, particularly in terms of your outlook on being modern technology, inclusive, educating, simplifying, you know, to make more law accessible as well. And, you know, this is probably quite a hard question for you to give one piece of advice, given you had so many incredible roles, but what would be your one piece of key advice for those who are looking to start their legal career?  

Angela Denning 33:44 

Oh, oh, I think it would be to remember the people. Like it’s not a file. It’s a person and a family that’s behind that. And I do think that that is like, I wouldn’t advise anybody to go into law if they don’t like people, if they don’t like dealing with people. So try it, try get a job in a pub, or a shop or a restaurant or something first and see, do you actually like dealing with people? Because the law might say one thing, but your clients will have their own ideas. And I think your ability to work with people is absolutely what will make or break your career and the law, that that ability to work with all kinds of people as well. We’re not all the same. That’s the joy of coming to work every day. And I do think I think at the end of the day, it’s not about it’s not about law, or cases. It’s about people.  

Rob Hanna 34:37 

I love that. And I bang on about this so much. Our listeners are probably bored of me saying that, but we’re no longer in b2c, or b2b, we’re in H two h which is the human to human connection in the world of work or wherever you’re looking to transact, buy, sell or do business and I think you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head by saying it’s about the people. It’s not just another farm, if you can grasp that and you enjoy that you’ll have flourishing career. This has been a masterclass Angela, I thoroughly enjoyed it start to finish if our listeners which I’m sure they will would like to learn more about your career, the court service, where can they go to find out more? Feel free to shout out any web links or any social media handles will also share them with this episode for you too?  

Angela Denning 35:16 

Yeah, well, www.courts.ie We’re on inst our word, listen to me, not Instagram, we’re on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. And we have an open data portal as well, if anybody wants court statistics, so that launched just after Christmas, so www.courts.data.ie We get to all of our data so and if you have any questions or anything, the old office, CEO email addresses also on the website there and you can bang on an email. 

Rob Hanna 35:44 

There you have it, folks. Well, thank you so much. Once again, Angela, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the legally speaking podcast. It feels weird to say wishing you lots of continued success given you’ve achieved so much already. But with your 10 year strategic plan and everything in the future, continue to do great things but for now, from all of us on the show, over and out.