When I show our members historical documents and they have a “wow” moment, it’s very rewarding. Seeing solicitors connect to the history of their profession is always satisfying. Whilst my role is to preserve history for the future, it’s also about promoting awareness of the archive so solicitors can engage with it.

The item that surprises members the most is a book called the Attourney’s Academy from 1623. Back then, to be a qualified attorney all you needed to do was own this book. It’s fun to show it to new solicitors on admission ceremony days – they have to do a lot more to qualify these days! It reminds us how the profession has developed.

One of my most surprising discoveries was that former president Sir Ernest Bird, elected in 1943, was also our first disabled president. I came across this long-forgotten fact as I was reading obituaries. His obituary revealed he lost an arm in a shooting accident at the age of 14.

This information stopped me in my tracks – I immediately went down to the Reading Room at 113 Chancery Lane to see his portrait. There, I could see his pose deliberately concealed the lost limb – a reflection on how disabilities were regarded at this time. Without the obituaries in our archive, this fact could have been lost completely.

It’s hard to put a figure on the size of the archive – but there's over 80 metres of shelving in the history room. You never know what you’ll discover until you open a box and start searching through it.

I must have looked at thousands of documents since I’ve been here. There’s also lots of ephemera and personal papers – we’ve even got a top hat! The toughest part of being an archivist is that there's never enough time to look through every box.

Our digital exhibition is brilliant because the timeline gives you the historical context to the legal milestones. It also features regional stories which are integral to the history of the organisation. It was a challenge to research, but I enjoyed finding out things that nobody had thought to look for before.

Our archive is quite corporate – we have a lot of minutes from board meetings – so it can be a challenge to make it engaging. To bring those to life, I track down human stories behind them that make them relatable.

I've curated three exhibitions during my time here – it’s been an amazing opportunity. This role is one that I’m always going to look back on with pride. Bringing to life 200 years of history and educating people about it has been fantastic. I’m also very proud to have originated the tours of the library that happen on admission days.

It's important that the Law Society keeps, preserves and recalls its history because it's the heritage of the profession. History not only shows how things happened in the past but also reveals the things that will probably occur in the future. When you look at it, we're very much still doing now lots of what we were doing 200 years ago.