Women in Law Awards 2026: submissions are open

Submissions and nominations are open for the Women in Law Awards 2026, culminating in a black-tie gala at Crown Melbourne. The program recognises women across Australian legal practice, in-house teams, and the businesses and initiatives supporting them.

With the Australian Law Awards concluded in July and the 30 Under 30 cycle closed since March, this is the only major national legal award currently accepting entries. If a nomination has been sitting on someone's to-do list, the window is now.

On the awkwardness of self-nomination

A persistent pattern in legal awards is that men nominate themselves and women wait to be nominated. The result is a submission pool that under-represents the field it is drawn from, and a set of winners who are disproportionately the people with a colleague willing to do the paperwork.

Two responses are available. Nominate yourself, which is neither immodest nor unusual — the categories are designed for it. Or nominate someone else this week, specifically someone who would never do it for herself. The second takes about forty minutes and is the more reliable intervention.

Details

• Status: Submissions and nominations open

• Gala: Black-tie, Crown Melbourne

• Categories: Individual and group categories across private practice, in-house and the wider legal sector

• Close date: Confirm directly with Lawyers Weekly — the published deadline should be checked before you plan your drafting

Submissions reward specificity. Judges read a great many descriptions of excellent leadership and very few descriptions of a particular thing a particular person did, with the result attached. Write the second kind.

One practical drafting note. Judges in these programs are reading several hundred submissions, most of which assert leadership, resilience and impact in indistinguishable terms. The submissions that survive that volume contain numbers, dates, named outcomes and at least one thing that went wrong. A nomination that describes a specific problem, the specific intervention and what measurably changed will beat a more accomplished candidate whose nomination reads like a performance review.

Learn more here: https://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/women-in-law-awards/