Matthew Dando

Practice Areas

Matthew is an experienced litigator, specialising in contentious commercial matters and publication disputes in the media industry.

“In any given day, I’m a lawyer, business adviser, strategist and manager of my team. I think clients particularly value my broad knowledge of media businesses and the media sector so they can be confident I understand their objectives. As someone with experience of working in-house, I appreciate the need for excellent service and pragmatic, commercial advice that goes beyond the purely legal.

My work is hugely varied, reflecting the wide-ranging issues that my clients face. I handle hotly fought disputes such as libel and privacy litigation for publishers, often against prominent and well-resourced public figures, as well as substantial and often international pieces of commercial litigation and arbitration.

I help clients at earlier stages too, working with media clients at a pre-publication/production stage to assess the risk profile of their content before it’s distributed and with commercial clients to consider contractual issues and stress test commercial scenarios so they can best prevent difficult situations arising at all.

Across all of this, I feel lucky to work in partnership with smart clients, often doing ground-breaking work, to find a path through problems that sometimes seem intractable. I approach these situations in a calm, level-headed way always with my clients’ perspectives and objectives front of mind. Sometimes it’s necessary to go all the way to court to achieve a result, but there is often a more constructive way.

While a lot of my work has a media focus, I also have a depth of experience with contractual and commercial disputes, including issues of rights exploitation, endorsement agreements, contractual interpretation, boardroom fallouts and responses to misuse of confidential information. No matter the situation, my aim is always to help clients gain early leverage and get back to their day job free from the distraction of disputes.”

Matthew holds qualifications in English law, French law, and European law from the Universities of Oxford, Paris and Edinburgh respectively and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (MCIArb).