The International Legal Aid Group : about ILAG In the 1990s it became increasingly clear that every developed country with a public legal aid programme faced similar challenges.  Expenditure rose faster than inflation, declining numbers of poorer citizens received assistance, the cost to recipients increased, the scope of available services was reduced and new problems in the quality of service delivery emerged.  Many governments cast increasingly critical glances at the management of legal aid, and were sceptical of the inability of providers to significantly reduce the cost of legal services delivery.  Moreover, governments and public administrators in many developed countries were reforming the role of the social welfare state, and often requiring new justifications for existing levels of public funding of citizens’ legal aid schemes. These developments would have been serious enough, if legal aid was merely another social welfare service. However, access to legal aid has an additional dimension.  It underpins fair and equal access to the legal system, which is an essential ingredient in the administration of justice in democratic societies committed to the rule of law.  Moreover, in many societies reduced availability of legal aid was paralleled by persistent and unsolved problems in popular access to justice. The response to the problems that confronted legal aid managers, policy makers and providers in Western countries towards the end of the 20th century remained largely mono-jurisdictional and national.  Although the challenges facing legal aid in these countries were similar, and the wider causes of problems in funding and delivery often highly comparable, awareness of overseas developments and comparative research tended to be quite patchy. Whilst the academics conducting empirical research in the field from various jurisdictions met regularly as members of the Working Group on Legal Professions of the ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law, the policymakers did not meet their counterparts frequently or the academic researchers.  Accordingly in 1992 the International Legal Aid Group ( ILAG ) was established in 1992 by Professor Alan Paterson, University of Strathclyde, and Mr Wouter Meurs, The Netherlands Ministry of Justice, to bring the two groups together. Thus it was that forty policymakers and academic researchers from the countries with the most developed legal aid programmes globally met for two and a half days in closed session in the Hague in 1992 to exchange ideas and to learn from each other. Following the success of the Hague conference others have followed on a biennial basis in Edinburgh, Vancouver, Melbourne, Harvard and Killarney. In the early days participants came from only seven countries. Today ILAG members are drawn from 25 jurisdictions with the CEOs and policymakers from 14 countries attending the conferences. The Antwerp conference will be our largest ever, with around 80 delegates. However, the essential format remains the same. As working conferences, attendance is by invitation only, the discussions are not published and no attributions can be made outside the conference hall. It is a fundamental tenet of ILAG conferences that there is more time for discussion than for presentations. In the first few years of the 2000s neither the problems of funding and providing legal aid nor other issues in citizens’ access to legal services in transforming national systems of social governance will disappear.  Legal aid managers, policy makers and providers will have to be more inventive and adaptive than ever before, and economic globalisation will confer a new urgency on the need for sharing of information and effective transmission of cross-national policy and service delivery developments. In such a context the formulation of evidence-based policymaking is at a premium and the raison d’etre of ILAG is to assist in this process.