Dominic Spenser Underhill
Dominic is an English Solicitor Advocate with over 35 years’ experience in dispute resolution, based primarily in London and the City of London.
He has practised as an international arbitrator since 2002, when he was the Head of International Arbitration in the London and Paris offices of what is known as Mayer Brown.
Dominic left Mayer Brown to set up his own law firm. He has worked out of Spenser Underhill Newmark LLP since 2006. He now practises as an arbitrator full time. He has a particular interest in banking and finance disputes.
From 2009-2024, Dominic was an Adjudicator for the Solicitors Regulation Authority to whom he also gave in-house training on legal professional ethics. He is a former Chair of the Solicitors Compensation Fund. From 2005-2020, Dominic also acted as a Legal Assessor to the Professional Disciplinary Tribunal of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales.
In 2024, Dominic was appointed and Honorary Professor at the School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches (amongst other things) the ethics of international arbitration. He had been a visiting lecturer there since 2009. Dominic is a former Visiting professor of the University of Turin, where he still lectures annually.
Practice Area
Panel
- Contributing Author
Qualified Year
- 1989
Membership
- Chartered Institute of Arbitrators - Fellow
- Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution – Accredited Mediator
1 Contributions by Dominic Spenser Underhill
PRACTICE NOTES
International arbitration ethics: conflicting duties, witness preparation, document production, guerrilla tactics, and counsel regulation under soft law, with tribunals ensuring equality of arms and recognising professional regulators’ primacy
Practitioners engaged in cross-border arbitration often presume that observing the ethical code of their own jurisdiction—the place where they are authorised and supervised—is sufficient. The reality is frequently far more intricate: those standards may or may not extend beyond national borders and, if they do, they can clash with norms governing the legal seat, with requirements set by the administering arbitral body, or with provisions embedded in the parties’ contract. Whether a lawyer’s ‘home’ rules govern foreign or international proceedings is regularly unclear or equivocal, especially for counsel admitted in several jurisdictions. Nor is it an entirely simple exercise to identify which other frameworks might bite. Even where the applicable professional obligations can be pinpointed, counsel and parties within the same tribunal process commonly hail from diverse legal traditions and cultures. Consequently, they may act in line with differing views of what amounts to proper professional and ethical behaviour. Hence international arbitration has famously been labelled an ‘ethical no-man’s land’. These divergent expectations and moral premises can generate uncertainty, disagreement, and procedural inefficiency in the arbitral context. Left unmanaged, such misalignments risk undermining fairness, escalating costs, and delaying resolution across otherwise efficient proceedings for all participants...
Arbitration
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