Jonathan Wayne co-founded Crownstone Advocates in 2007 alongside Alexander Brown, and opened the firm's Dubai office in 2013, giving it a physical footprint in both the EU and the Gulf. A recognised arbitration practitioner before the DIFC-LCIA and ICC, he has represented government-linked entities and multinational developers in some of the region's largest commercial disputes. He chairs the firm's UAE office.

Two decades of practice in Dubai gave him a front-row view of the emirate's transformation from a regional trading hub into a genuine international arbitration seat, and he has shaped his own practice around that shift — building relationships with DIFC-LCIA and ICC tribunals long before doing so was standard for firms based outside London or Paris. Inside the firm, he pairs personally with associates trained in Maltese civil procedure, on the view that a common-law arbitration practitioner who cannot also argue from a civil-law drafting instinct is only half as useful to a genuinely cross-border client.

Jonathan's approach to a dispute starts with the documents that existed before anyone anticipated a fight — correspondence, site records, board minutes — rather than the narrative a client's own team has since built around them. That discipline runs through the firm's arbitration practice generally: cases are argued from the contemporaneous record first, and expert reconstruction only fills the gaps that record genuinely leaves open.