Diane Sechi has a background as a legal aid lawyer and supervisor specialising in housing law, community care law, welfare benefits and debt. She has a special interest in helping the most vulnerable and combatting injustice. Notable successful Court of Appeal cases: Lomax v Gosport Borough Council (2018) EWCA Civ 1846 and Mahmoudi v LB of Lewisham & Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2014] EWCA Civ 284.
Diane has an interest in public law and mental health law and spent some years at Springfield Law Centre situated in Springfield Psychiatric hospital where her clients were inpatients or under the community mental health team. Diane has designed and led on projects delivering outreach clinics to the vulnerably excluded across several London boroughs, and has been involved with collaborative funding bids to provide holistic services. In 2015 she joined Simmons & Simmons to set up an Access to Justice Programme to oversee and supervise volunteers undertaking pro bono case work for disability benefit appeals and more complex right to reside appeals. The Programme has now successfully extended to client partnering enabling in-house legal teams to engage. Diane is committed to the provision of access to justice and legal rights especially in context of court modernisation. She continues to practice at the Law Centre in addition to her pro bono supervision. Diane is a trustee of the Bar Pro Bono Unit and Child Poverty Action Group. She has sat on many working parties and currently sits on the Litigants in Person vulnerable working group.