Wayne Barnes OBE | Law Career

A practising criminal barrister since 2003, Wayne balanced his legal career with his professional rugby commitments and is a partner at globally renowned law firm Squire Patton Boggs in London.

Wayne is part of the Government Investigation and White-Collar Crime team but is also regularly instructed by national and international governing bodies, professional sports organisations, commercial sponsors, and rights holders on all aspects of sports law, governance, ethics, and safeguarding.

In addition, Wayne Barnes specialises in bribery, corruption, and other financial crime investigations. He has acted for many multinational companies that have been prosecuted by the world’s largest international law enforcement agencies.

An experienced criminal barrister and trial advocate, Wayne is an accomplished public speaker on the corporate and legal circuit and regularly delivers training to companies and individuals to avoid regulator intervention.

Wayne Barnes OBE | Corporate Speaking & Workshops

Wayne Barnes is a highly engaging corporate speaker. He draws upon his lengthy career in top-flight sport and his legal background to deliver interactive corporate talks and workshops, commanding natural respect from any audience.

Topics include:

Leadership: Workshop exploring how strong leadership means being a true part of your team.

The True Meaning of Team: The fine art of navigating (and working with) your competition, what it means to build cross-discipline togetherness, and how diversity of thought is valuable to your team’s development.

Thriving through adversity: Preparing for the nuclear scenario, how to deal with pressure with a clear head and techniques for surviving the fall-out of failure and coming back stronger.

Learning Culture: Review, review, review: how a learning culture is relevant every day, not just in retrospect. Hear how laying it all out publicly and developing an honest – and sometimes brutal – review culture from the top to the bottom of an organisation sounds scary. However, it’s the only way to truly improve.

Motivational: Techniques for building confidence, having self-belief and silencing inner and vocal external critics in your personal development.

Conflict: Advice on dealing with difficult personalities, separating fact from emotion, navigating the blame game and communicating clearly and calmly, even under extreme pressure.

Governance & regulation: Fairness, ethics, integrity, and doing things the right way; an overview of what business can learn from sport and vice versa.

Wayne Barnes OBE | Entertainment Speaker 

Cheating, fighting, death threats, controversy, failure, success, the sublime to the ridiculous – Wayne has seen and experienced it all. Wayne is a highly sought-after keynote and entertainment speaker, participating in hundreds of corporate and fundraising events.

As a former Rugby Speaker of the Year, Wayne has a wealth of stories to share, spanning extraordinary highs and challenging lows, including his hard-earned experiences from five Rugby World Cups and beyond. From frozen pitches and abandoned test matches to life-changing judgement calls, the funniest and most difficult players, bribery attempts, and having to leave the stadium in disguise in the back of an ambulance, Wayne has witnessed it all.

With connections in football, cricket, tennis, and many other sports, his detailed insights into the challenges faced by global sports are both amusing and informative, offering unbelievable behind-the-scenes perspectives from some of the biggest competitions in sport.

Wayne Barnes OBE | Autobiography

In 2023, Wayne published Throwing the Book, his autobiography that lifts the lid on how he spent years trying to keep the biggest names in rugby on their best behaviour.

Candid, humble and warmly told, Throwing the Book is a definitive account of what it means to be a rugby referee and a love letter to the sport that has provided Wayne with so much. Covering his childhood days, family life, career highs and lows, side-step into law, as well as what’s next in store for Wayne both on and off the pitch, this book reveals the man behind the referee for the very first time.

Call +44 1753 439 289 or email Great British Speakers now to book World Rugby Referee of the Year, barrister and speaker Wayne Barnes OBE for your next corporate event.

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