Sir Simon Picken (born 23 April 1966) is a British High Court judge. Picken was educated at

Cardiff High School Cardiff High School () is a comprehensive school in the Cyncoed area of Cardiff, Wales. Stephen Jones has been Headteacher since 2011. History Although the school was established in its current form in 1970, its origins go back much furthe ...

, then completed an

LLB A Bachelor of Laws (; LLB) is an undergraduate law degree offered in most common law countries as the primary law degree and serves as the first professional qualification for legal practitioners. This degree requires the study of core legal subje ...

University College, Cardiff Cardiff University () is a public research university in Cardiff, Wales. It was established in 1883 as the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire and became a founding college of the University of Wales in 1893. It was renamed Unive ...

in 1987 and a starred first-class

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

from

Magdalene College, Cambridge Magdalene College ( ) is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary ...

in 1988. He was

called to the bar The call to the bar is a legal term of art in most common law jurisdictions where persons must be qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party and are then said to have been "called to the bar" or to have received "call to ...

at the

Middle Temple The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known simply as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court entitled to Call to the bar, call their members to the English Bar as barristers, the others being the Inner Temple (with whi ...

in 1989, then established a practice at the bar in the area of commercial law, practising from 7 King's Bench Walk chambers from 1991. He

took silk A King's Counsel ( post-nominal initials KC) is a senior lawyer appointed by the monarch (or their viceregal representative) of some Commonwealth realms as a "Counsel learned in the law". When the reigning monarch is a woman, the title is Qu ...

in 2006, served as a

recorder Recorder or The Recorder may refer to: Newspapers * ''Indianapolis Recorder'', a weekly newspaper * ''The Recorder'' (Massachusetts newspaper), a daily newspaper published in Greenfield, Massachusetts, US * ''The Recorder'' (Port Pirie), a newsp ...

in 2005 to 2015, a Deputy High Court judge from 2010. From 2009 to 2015, he was the Commercial Law QC to the

Welsh Government The Welsh Government ( ) is the Executive (government), executive arm of the Welsh devolution, devolved government of Wales. The government consists of Cabinet secretary, cabinet secretaries and Minister of State, ministers. It is led by the F ...

. In addition to practice, he wrote ''Good Faith and Insurance Contracts'' which was taken into a fourth edition. He was appointed a High Court judge in 2015, and received the customary knighthood. He has been a judge of the

Commercial Court Business courts, sometimes referred to as commercial courts, are specialized courts for legal cases involving commercial law, internal business disputes, and other matters affecting businesses. In the US, they are trial courts that primarily or ...

since 2016, is on the Financial List and is lead judge for European relations. From 2018 to 2021, he was the Presiding Judge of Wales. In April 2022, he presided over

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's £270 million

competition Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indi ...

case in which Microsoft encouraged customers to return unused licences in turn for a discount on Microsoft products; a Derbyshire-based company who bought and sold unused these licences said this stifled competition and was a violation of competition law. He married Sophie Victoria Seddon in 1992, with whom he has one son and three daughters.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Picken, Simon Living people 1966 births 21st-century English judges Knights Bachelor Alumni of Magdalene College, Cambridge Alumni of Cardiff University Members of the Middle Temple People educated at Cardiff High School Queen's Bench Division judges Welsh King's Counsel 21st-century King's Counsel