William Johnston is an economics graduate of Trinity College Dublin; he qualified as a solicitor while training in McCann FitzGerald LLP and was a partner in Arthur Cox LLP for 30 years where he was head of the Financial Services Department for 16 years and Chair of the Learning and Development Committee for ten years; he is now a Consultant with ByrneWallace LLP; he was Chair of the Law Society’s Business Law Committee for two years and has lectured in the Law Society’s Diploma in Finance Law for 20 years and is currently the Law Society’s external Examiner in Banking Law and the lecturer on legal opinions in the Law Society’s Professional Course; he was a Board member of UCD’s Commercial Law Centre for six years and is a member of the editorial Boards of Commercial Law Practitioner, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law and Business Law International; he represented the Law Society on the Company Law Review Group in 1994 and was a Ministerial nominee to the Company Law Review Group from 2000 to 2018 during which he chaired seven subcommittees; he was the first chair from Ireland of the Banking Law Committee of the International Bar Association where he also chaired the Banking Law Regulation sub-committee and the Legal Opinions sub-committee; his publications include Banking and Security Law in Ireland (1998 Butterworths) (2000 Bloomsbury Professional) and for Oxford University Press Set-off Law and Practice (2006, 2010, 2018) and Security over Receivables (2008).