Brown Rudnick LLP

Litigation & Arbitration

Partner

Jane Colston is co-practice group leader of the Firm's Litigation & Arbitration Practice Group in London.  Her practice focuses on complex and high-value commercial banking, contract and tort disputes as well as company, shareholders and partnership disputes. Jane has acted in numerous complex fraud cases and has extensive experience of forensic investigations, most of which have involved working with teams of investigators and accountants, and coordinating lawyers in multiple jurisdictions to trace and freeze assets. She has managed numerous cases involving freezing, proprietary, search, disclosure, gagging, imaging and delivery up injunctions as well as breach of confidence and privacy claims. Jane is also a CEDR Accredited Mediator.

Jane has acted in numerous cases where millions to billions of pounds have been at stake including involving states. Jane therefore has a deep technical knowledge but also real experience of how to run these cases successfully.

Jane has substantial experience of acting as a supervising solicitor appointed by the Courts of England and Wales in regard to the execution of search, imaging and door-step delivery up orders and leads Brown Rudnick's Supervising Solicitors team. Jane also lectures on topics including the impact of artificial intelligence on the legal and insolvency professions at international conferences such as those hosted by the International Bar Association, C5 Fraud Asset Tracing and Recovery, the Standing International Forum of Commercial Courts and the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and INSOL Academic Group, INSOL Asia Hub and SGRI (SMU).

Jane serves as Diversity, Equity & Inclusion partner ("DEI partner"), along with her counterpart Chelsea Mullarney in the New York office. As a DEI partner, Jane works alongside the director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion to develop and implement the Firm's strategy for maintaining an inclusive work environment. In this role, Jane is a visible champion for the Firm's efforts to recruit, hire, develop and promote diverse and women lawyers, and actively engages Firm leadership to ensure equity and inclusion remain strategic business priorities.

Jane's passion for inclusion extends beyond her role as DEI partner to her practice and external activities. Since 2016, Jane has organized the Firm's Women in Business speaker series, bringing together women lawyers and business professionals from across industries to discuss their careers. Jane also serves as the diversity & inclusion officer for the International Bar Association's Litigation Committee and has spoken at several diversity-related conferences on topics related to inclusion in the legal profession.

Prior to joining Brown Rudnick, Jane trained and then qualified into Hogan Lovells’ litigation department. She then joined Baker & McKenzie. In 2004 she co-founded the litigation boutique Masseys which was described by The Times as "go to" for banking disputes. It merged with Stewarts in 2010.

University of East Anglia – LL.B. Law