Corporate partnerships

Collaboration with global law firms and barristers' chambers is a vital part of what makes Oxford a leading law school in the twenty-first century. We offer our corporate partners unique opportunities to contribute to and work with the exceptional research faculty and students at Oxford Law. By working with us, they play a key role in providing outstanding legal education and research.

By working with our corporate partners, we can maintain and build upon our long tradition of academic excellence and nurture the next generation of the world’s leading lawyers, teachers and researchers. Through funding academic research, teaching posts, scholarships, or donating to support prizes and awards to celebrate academic achievement, your support means that we can deliver a legal education to meet current needs and future challenges.

Support from the profession has been essential to our growth and development. It has been the margin that allows us to navigate, innovate, and thrive in a challenging environment and remain a world-class and globally competitive faculty. We welcome the opportunity to build new partnerships across the profession. We offer corporate partners a number of unique opportunities to contribute in a meaningful way to teaching and research at Oxford:

• Endow a Chair or other faculty post
• Scholarships
• Provide funding for a research project
• Fund student prizes and awards
• Support collections and databases in the Bodleian Law Library

Building partnerships

Kristin van Zweiten, Clifford Chance Associate Professor of Law and Finance

These partnerships have been truly transformative across our teaching, research, and access initiatives. Several named posts have been established thanks to longstanding support from corporate partners across various areas of law. 

In 2012, Robert Stevens was elected to the Herbert Smith Freehills Professorship of English Private Law. Linklaters has funded professorships since 2012, most recently with Jennifer Payne as the Linklaters Professorship of Corporate Finance Law. The Travers Smith Associate Professorship of Corporate Finance, held by Chris Hare, was established more than 20 years ago with endowment funding. Slaughter and May Professor of Competition Law, Ariel Ezrachi, runs the University’s programme in that field. In 2012 Clifford Chance established the Associate Professor in Law and Finance, and is now held by Dr Kristin Van Zwieten. 

Historically, Allen & Overy supported the Professorship of Corporate Law – the longest standing of the donor-funded Professorships in Oxford Law – and has now established the Allen & Overy Equality and Diversity Officer post, enabling the Law Faculty to build on our Athena Swan and Social Mobility interests. Similarly, the Baker McKenzie Access Officer oversees development and engagement for Oxford Law’s Access programmes. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, having funded the Chair in Commercial Law, now funds an outreach programme, the ExpLaw Summer School, complementing our Oxford UNIQ programme. 

For over a decade, the Hogan Lovells Professor of Law and Finance, Professor John Armour, took the lead in the Law and Finance programme and now Hogan Lovells supports open hours in the Bodleian Law Library. CMS provides major support for a research programme in the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies on the future of European Civil Justice Systems. 8 New Square continues to provide funding for our Oxford International Intellectual Property Moot and White & Case has funded Law in unrestricted ways, and so in recognition of their gift we have named a prominent lecture room the White & Case Lecture Room.

Recognition of support

Our Development Office will work to build a partnership based on an exchange of information, assistance and communication with your firm. As with other major benefactors, our partnerships grow with the Faculty’s understanding of the firm’s profile and interest to our student, alumni and faculty alike. We will work closely with you to ensure your expectations of recognition, acknowledgement, clarity and creative joint planning of activity are met in order to build our relationship. 

For further information and to discuss engagement opportunities, please contact the Faculty's Alumni and Development team.

All donations to Oxford Law are received in accordance with the University’s Donor Charter