Professor Julian Webb

Julian Webb is a Professor at Melbourne Law School where he teaches in the areas of legal ethics, civil procedure, and regulatory theory. He previously held chairs at the Universities of Warwick and Westminster in the UK and has been an honorary or visiting professor at the Universities of Leeds and Exeter, University College, London, and the Southampton Institute in the UK as well as Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in the USA. He has also held a visiting Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.

Julian's current research focuses on professional culture and lawyer wellbeing, and on technological and regulatory disruption in the law and legal services. He was Principal Investigator on the Melbourne Networked Society Institute project, Regulating Automated Legal Advice Tools (2018) and was lead author of the law and legal services input paper to the Australian Council of Learned Academies’ report to Federal Government, The Effective and Ethical Development of Artificial Intelligence: An Opportunity to Improve our Wellbeing (2019). In 2016 he was identified in a study by the International Bar Association as one of the world's fifteen most cross-cited scholars on innovation and disruption in legal services. His recent paper 'Legal Technology: The Great Disruption' (in Abel et ed, Lawyers in 21st Century Societies) was shortlisted in the Australian Legal Research Awards 2023.

Julian was a founding editor of the international journal Legal Ethics and edits, with Professor John Paterson (University of Aberdeen), the 'Law, Science and Society' book series published by Routledge. His published works include Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations (Oxford UP, 2000, with Donald Nicholson) and the edited collection, Leading Works in Legal Ethics (Routledge, 2023).