Diana Wallis is a qualified but non-practising solicitor with a long involvement in all forms of dispute resolution. She was for several years a solicitor in a central London firm heading their Litigation Department and herself specialising in mainly cross border commercial litigation.

For 12 years she was a Member of the European Parliament where she played a leading role in major items of legislation impacting of civil and commercial justice. Since leaving the Parliament in 2012 she has become an accredited Mediator and Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. She has undertaken a range of work in many formats of dispute resolution.

In 2013 she was appointed as the first independent arbitrator to oversee the work of the national deposit libraires and the publishing industry in carrying out the task of non-print legal deposit in protecting our cultural heritage., she still old this role today.

She has carried out paper-based arbitration for several consumer schemes including the ABTA travel scheme for a number of years and has recently been advising the global petition platform Change.org on its dispute resolution processes likely to include an arbitration scheme.

Between 2017 and 2021 she was a senior lecturer at the Law School of the University of Hull including teaching a module at post graduate MA level in International Commercial Arbitration.

She remains active in several legal organisations having been president of the European Law Institute from 2013-2017, she is a Trustee both of the British Institute of International & Comparative Law (BIICL) and the European Law Academy (ERA). She is a long-term member of the Law Society’s EU Committee of which she will take over the Chairmanship in September 2022.