Expert resume of Sir William Blair

P.R.I.M.E. Finance Advisory Board; former Judge in Charge of the Commercial Court and Financial List Judge for England and Wales; First President of the Board of Appeal, European Supervisory Authorities; Professor of Financial Law and Ethics, Queen Mary University London; Arbitrator, 3 Verulam Buildings (UK); P.R.I.M.E. Finance Expert

Sir William (Bill) Blair is Professor of Financial Law and Ethics at Queen Mary University of London, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, and currently sits as an international arbitrator in ICC, ICSID and LCIA cases. He is a member of the LCIA and is on the Beijing International Arbitration Center’s Panel of Arbitrators.

He served as a High Court Judge in England and Wales for nearly ten years and was Judge in Charge of the London Commercial Court from 2016, helping to establish the specialist Financial List and the Standing International Forum of Commercial Courts. He continues to sit occasionally in the Court.

In 2017, Sir William re-joined the leading barristers’ Chambers 3 Verulam Buildings, London, in the International Advisory and Dispute Resolution Unit, having previously practised from these chambers as a commercial KC before appointment to the bench.

Member and first President of the Board of Appeal of the European Supervisory Authorities, in 2018 Bill was appointed Chair of the Bank of England’s Enforcement Decision Making Committee (EDMC) and was also appointed to the International Commercial Expert Committee of the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China.

He has been sitting as a Judge of the Qatar International Court and as a Deputy Judge of the Court of First Instance of the High Court of Hong Kong SAR, China since 2018.

Bill Blair is a member of London’s Financial Markets Law Committee and chairs the Monetary Law Committee of the International Law Association. He is a member of the Expert Working Group on Commercial Dispute Resolution of the Chinese and UK judiciaries, and an expert adviser to the Oxford University OBOR Institute.

Bill graduated from Oxford University, and holds or has held visiting Professorships at the London School of Economics (LSE), Peking University Law School (PKU), East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL), is Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong (HKU), and a Fellow of the Oxford University Commercial Law Centre. He is a member of P.R.I.M.E. Finance's Advisory Board and its Panel of Experts.

In 2018, Bill joined the Ethics Committee of Digital Catapult’s AI Machine Intelligence Garage.