Paul Dillon's professional life was centred in Sydney, New South Wales, where he completed his legal education and built a career as a solicitor. Sydney is the state capital of New South Wales and Australia's largest city, and its law firms and courts formed the setting for his practice.
Paul Dillon studied at the University of Sydney, where he received a Bachelor of Laws in 1973. Australia's oldest university, the University of Sydney established its law faculty in 1855 as one of its first three faculties, alongside Arts and Medicine, although systematic teaching only began in 1890 under its first chair and dean, Pitt Cobbett.
Keith Shatwell was dean of the Sydney Law School from 1947 to 1973, a period that covered the years of Dillon's legal studies. The Law Society of New South Wales helped establish The College of Law in 1973, replacing articles of clerkship with a full-time practical legal training course for graduates entering practice as solicitors, in the year before Dillon was admitted as a solicitor.
Paul Dillon was admitted as a solicitor in 1974. Since then his practice has consisted predominantly of commercial litigation in the superior and lower courts of New South Wales, various tribunals, and the Federal Court and Federal Circuit Court of Australia.
A professional profile dates his service at Phillips Fox from 1979, when he worked as a lawyer in insurance law. He became a senior associate in 1984 and a partner in 1986, and the profile places the end of that partnership in 2000. Phillips Fox was one of the largest law firms in Australasia, and a company profile says it was founded in 1864 as P.D. Phillips. By 2010 the firm was operating under the DLA Phillips Fox name, and it had become part of the international DLA Piper network.
Insurance law formed a major part of his work at Phillips Fox. A Rankin Ellison profile describes about twenty years as an insurance lawyer, including a period as a partner in a leading national insurance law firm, handling professional indemnity, product liability, public liability, personal injury, insurance coverage and reinsurance disputes.
Rankin Ellison Lawyers is an Australian law practice whose team profile presents Dillon as a consultant and commercial litigator acting for individuals and corporations. The profile describes a career of 46 years in the legal profession, including earlier experience in a pre-eminent law firm in the City of London.
Paul Dillon is a member of the Law Society of New South Wales, the professional association for solicitors in New South Wales. The Society traces its origins to 1842, when a group of solicitors sought to promote good practice and public confidence in the profession, and it later gained statutory powers to regulate solicitors' practice.
He is also a member of the Law Council of Australia, the national representative body of the Australian legal profession.
