Dean Merriman

Profile

Dean practices in public and regulatory, commercial, and international law, and accepts briefs to appear and advise across these areas.

Dean has particular expertise and extensive experience in Australian and international trade and investment law. His experience includes customs matters (including tariff classification and concessions), free trade agreements, anti-dumping and countervailing measures, sanctions, prohibited and restricted imports and exports, WTO dispute settlement, and international investment arbitration. These areas of law form one part of Dean’s growing regulatory and civil penalty practice.

Dean represents clients across a range of subject-matter areas, including civil penalties, contract, corporations, debt recovery, employment, insolvency, merits/judicial review, property, shareholder and trade practices matters. Dean has acted for Australian and foreign companies and individuals; as well as for and/or against a range of government entities (including the Anti-Dumping Review Panel, ASIC, the ATO, the Comptroller-General of Customs, the Department of Home Affairs, TEQSA, and the Valuer-General of Victoria).

Dean maintains a busy civil interlocutory practice and appears regularly in applications concerning default judgment, discovery, security for costs, strike-out and summary judgment, suppression orders, applications under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and other interlocutory matters. He also appears for clients at compulsory examinations.

Prior to coming to the Bar, Dean was an Account Director in Deloitte’s Indirect Tax team, focussing on international trade matters. Dean joined Deloitte after spending several years as a lawyer at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, where his principal role was as counsel to the Panel adjudicating the legality of Australia’s tobacco plain packaging laws.

Dean has a Master of Laws (International Economic Law) from the University of Barcelona, a Juris Doctor from Melbourne Law School and a Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) from the University of Melbourne. He is currently undertaking a Masters of Law at Melbourne Law School, with a focus on taxation, private international law, and regulatory areas of law.

Dean is a member of the Customs & International Transactions Committee of the Law Council of Australia, having previously acted as its Chair (2024-2025) and Deputy Chair (2022-2023). He has been an occasional sessional lecturer at Melbourne Law School and Monash Law School, specifically in the area of international economic law.

Dean has published articles in Australian and international journals, as follows:

• Tania Voon & Dean Merriman, ‘Is Australia’s Foreign Investment Screening Policy Consistent with International Investment Law?’, (2022) 23(1) Melbourne Journal of International Law 62.
• Tania Voon & Dean Merriman, ‘Incoming: How International Investment Law Constrains Foreign Investment Screening’, (2023) 24(1) Journal of World Investment and Trade.

Dean read with Kateena O’Gorman SC. His senior mentor was Penny Neskovcin KC (as Her Honour then was).