Five members have now been appointed to the Council and will take up three-year posts on 28 May.

They are:

• Joel Conn (solicitor member)
• Ian Maxwell (consumer representative member)

• Jane Williams (consumer representative member)
• Brandon Malone (LP member)
• Employment Judge Joseph d’Inverno (LP member).

Three of these are new appointments, and two (Mr Maxwell and Judge D’Inverno) are re-appointments. The Chair of the Council, the Lord President, Lord Carloway, welcomed the members, saying: “I look forward to working with each of them. Their knowledge and experience will be a valuable contribution to the Council’s work in taking forward the historic reforms proposed in the Scottish Civil Courts Review.

“I would also like to thank those leaving the Council, Eric Baijal (solicitor member), Lauren Bruce (consumer representative member) and Professor Frances Wasoff (Lord President member), for their excellent work during their tenure.”

Biographies

Joel Conn

Mr Conn graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1996 and was admitted as a solicitor in 1998. He is a partner in Morton Fraser’s litigation division based in Glasgow. He specialises in commercial litigation and debt recovery and has particular expertise in insolvency, factoring and finance leasing, complex secured debt recovery and all aspects of contract disputes. He was the first solicitor to be awarded accreditation by the Law Society of Scotland as a specialist in Debt & Asset Recovery Law and frequently provides training on these issues to members of the legal and other professions, as well as to clients.

Ian Maxwell

Mr Maxwell is the National Development Manager for Families Need Fathers Scotland (FNF). FNF is a charity concerned with the problems of maintaining a child's relationship with both parents during and after family breakdown. He was previously seconded to the Scottish Government Transport Directorate as Manager of ‘Smarter Choices, Smarter Places’, a sustainable travel demonstration programme involving infrastructure and promotional work with local authorities. Before that, he was Deputy Director of One Parent Families Scotland. He is founding member and currently treasurer of the Bike Station charity.

Jane Williams

Ms Williams is a lecturer in business law at Queen Margaret University and plays a key role in the University’s Consumer Dispute Resolution Centre, a centre of excellence for continuing professional development, research and knowledge exchange in dispute resolution. She teaches primarily consumer and business law and topics relating to managing complaints and customer experience to undergraduates, and has delivered training to regulators and ombudsman organisations relating to complaint handling and ombudsman practice. Her current research interests relate to dispute design particularly in relation to consumer disputes. She was recently one of the co-authors on two reports commissioned by the Legal Ombudsman on the future of ombudsman schemes in the United Kingdom published in July 2013 and on models of dispute resolution in November 2014. As a former Trading Standards Officer she has a particular interest in the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and its enforcement in the UK, as well as the enforcement of regulatory law more widely, and has previously published in this area.

Brandon Malone

Mr Malone is a solicitor advocate with over 20 years’ experience in dispute resolution. He is accredited by the Law Society of Scotland as a specialist in Construction Law and as a specialist in Arbitration Law, and convenes the Society’s Arbitration Accreditation Committee. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, an Honorary Lecturer at the Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee and an External Examiner in arbitration law and practice at Robert Gordon University. Mr Malone is Chairman of the Scottish Arbitration Centre’s Board and is also Co-Director of the International Centre for Energy Arbitration. He is regularly appointed as an arbitrator and is a member of the panel of arbitrators of the International Centre for Dispute Resolution and of the Bahrain Chamber of Dispute Resolution. 

Joseph d’Inverno

Judge d'lnverno is currently an Employment Judge, sitting in the Employment Tribunal Scotland, and has held that appointment since 2002. He practised as a solicitor from 1983 onwards and qualified as a solicitor advocate in 1993. He is currently one of eight ‘judge mediators’ in Scotland. Judge d'Inverno is a former member of the Sheriff Court Rules Council. He is also a serving officer of the Territorial Army.

The appointments were made by the Lord President following an open and competitive recruitment exercise in consultation with the Scottish Ministers and the Law Society of Scotland.

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