Community of Practice
Learn more about our Community of Practice – a participatory space where litigators, legal practitioners, and litigating organisations can come together
Community of Practice
There is a growing desire within the legal field to take a more community-focused approach in litigation work. To support this change, we are facilitating a Community of Practice – a participatory space where litigators, legal practitioners, and litigating organisations can come together for mutual learning, unlearning, and shared reflection.
The Community has grown steadily since its inception in 2022 and currently consists of practitioners from 28 different organisations across Europe, who are working on issues ranging from civil liberties and climate justice to racial profiling and reproductive rights.
Through regular meetings and retreats, the Community of Practice offers a unique space to exchange strategies, question power imbalances between lawyers and communities, and collectively co-create practices that allow legal practitioners to better serve communities resisting injustice. By sharing its learnings, the Community aims to ignite a paradigm shift in strategic litigation for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice.
Photo: Community of Practice participants / Systemic Justice
The first retreat hosted in France in 2022 established our shared mission and grounding values: to promote community-centred lawyering and reframe litigation processes. Following this, we launched an online collaboration platform and co-created our Community Agreement. Since then, the community has expanded, and we’ve hosted multiple workshops. Our most recent retreat, held in 2024 in Montenegro, centred on exploring how we can build deeper connections with the communities we work with.
Looking ahead, the CoP has co-designed a 12-month learning journey for 2026. Through continued monthly sessions and our next retreat, we will further explore how to embed community-centred approaches into litigation practice. Our long-term goal is to shift the legal field so that community-centred litigation becomes the norm, rather than the exception.
Photo: Community Visions for Liberation event, Berlin / Mohamed Badarne
Get involved
If you are a litigator or part of a litigating organisation working on racial, social, economic, and climate justice in the Council of Europe region, and believe your work could benefit from being part of the Community, you can get involved by emailing us at communityofpractice@systemicjustice.ngo.