John Eidinow read Greats at Oxford, where he took a double First and won a Craven Scholarship. The holder of a Queen Mother’s Fund Scholarship from Middle Temple, he was awarded a Diploma in Law with Distinction by City University. He was called to the Bar in 1992.

He has a chancery litigation practice specialising in trusts (domestic and offshore), wills, probate and the administration of estates, and Inheritance Act claims, and also has much experience of litigation in related claims involving professional negligence, real property, and personal insolvency. He has been instructed in connection with litigation in The Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, the Isle of Man, and the Republic of Ireland. He is a member of the Association of Contentious Trust and Probate Specialists.

Amongst other high-profile cases in which he has been instructed have been Maxwell Communications Corporation v. Coopers & Lybrand (which concerned allegations of negligence against the accountants who audited Robert Maxwell’s companies), Balkanbank v. Taher (an inquiry into damages flowing from the grant of a worldwide Mareva injunction against an individual with multinational business interests), PMSA v. Secunda (which concerned the assignment of the rights in Jimi Hendrix’s recordings, and involved issues of ratification and Panamanian insolvency law), the Atlas Trust litigation (which involved inter alia the biggest claim ever made by the New York Securities and Exchange Commission outside the United States), and the Weissfisch litigation.

His principal extra-legal interest is classical Latin literature and he is Honorary Secretary of the Horatian Society.  He is a Bodley Fellow (honoris causa) and Dean of Merton College, Oxford.