Alison Matthews

Alison is the director of quality and risk at Shoosmiths. With her team, she is responsible for all quality/risk/compliance issues at the firm, including anti money laundering (AML), data protection, FCA and professional conduct.

She is renowned as one of the UK's leading experts on AML and professional conduct, having won numerous awards as the UK's anti-money laundering adviser of the year for the last 6 years in succession.

Alison was a member of and latterly chair of The Law Society's money laundering taskforce, lobbying on the 2nd and 3rd European money laundering directives and a key member of the government's money laundering advisory committee.

She is the author of the AML Toolkit (1st and 2nd Editions) and the Data Protection Toolkit (1st and 2nd Editions) published by The Law Society of England and Wales and is a regular contributor to legal publications.

She has her own consultancy business lecturing on AML, data protection and professional conduct for all the UK law societies, providing a wide range of compliance services/advice/internal training to solicitors, including drafting legislation and conduct rules for offshore law societies.

She served as an investment business executive in professional ethics at The Law Society for 10 years, before spending 11 years in private practice, before joining Shoosmiths in 2015. She was a key policy adviser on financial services (involved in the creation of the designated professional body regime) as well as the guidance expert on those issues. Her expertise in court of protection work led to her being a member of the joint committee of The Law Society and the court of protection.