Wilfrid Philips Notarial Lecture 2026 - Tuesday 22nd September 2026

Known unknowns or unknown unknowns? Professional negligence in the AI world

Given by: Professor Mark Lunney

Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London

5.45pm-7.15pm

£36 incl VAT Click here to book

The Scriveners Company in association with the Society of Scrivener Notaries is pleased to invite you to attend the 2026 Wilfrid Philips Notarial Lecture.

One cannot engage with any professional media without AI taking centre stage. A library (or should this be a data centre?) could be filled with literature on the topic. One subset of this information involves the impact of AI on the liability of professionals. From the perspective of an academic tort lawyer of thirty-five years’ experience and general principles, Scrivener Mark Lunney will consider the disruption the use of AI presents in applying conventional rules of professional negligence, including the recently released Legal Statement on Liability for AI Harms from the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce.

The evening will include an opportunity for informal discussion and a drinks reception.

Please book before 8am on Tuesday 22 September

Professor Mark Lunney

Mark Lunney is a Professor at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Law at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. He trained as a solicitor in Brisbane before obtaining an LLM from the University of Cambridge. Between 1991-2003 he was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader at the School of Law, King's College London, a Visiting Professor in 2018-19, and a Professor since 2020. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of New England between 2003-2011, and Professor from 2012-2023, and from 2011-2012 he was Professor and Director of Research in the ANU College of Law.

His research interests are the law of tort, and the history of the common law and legal profession. He has published extensively on the law of torts in both Australia and the United Kingdom (see, for example, Barker, Cane, Lunney & Trindade, The Law of Torts in Australia (5th edn, 2012) and five editions of Lunney & Oliphant, Tort Law: Text and Materials between 2000-2013. He is also a contributing editor to the practitioners’ reference work Tort Law (3rd edn, 2015, Butterworths Common Law Series). He is the inaugural Australian member, and a member of the Executive Committee, of the World Tort Law Society, Junior Vice-President and Council member of the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History, a Fellow of the Australian Centre for Private Law at the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland, a member of the European Centre for Tort and Insurance Law in Vienna, an International Associate of the Brazilian Institute on Tort Law, and an Adjunct Research Fellow of the Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in Agriculture. His monograph, A History of Australian Tort Law 1901-1945: England’s Obedient Servant?’ was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. In September 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.

St Mary at Hill

In the 10th and 11th centuries Billingsgate Quay was an important Anglo-Saxon harbour. The primary route north from the river Thames into the old city travelled directly past the church. The road had a particularly steep rise, which subsequently gave the church the name of St Mary at or on the Hill. In 1666 the medieval building was almost destroyed in the Great Fire with the reconstructed church in place by 1677.

St Mary-at-Hill was fortunate enough to retain the unique interior of a Victorian church until a fire in 1988, with the dome and roof collapsing and damaging the church below. The main structure has since been extensively restored.

Billingsgate was historically associated with the selling of fish from the 1500s onwards and St Mary-at-Hill hosts its Fish Harvest on the second Sunday of October each year.