John Pickering was a solictor known to have been active in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool in the the 1980s and 1990s, working at the firm John Pickering and Partners which he established in 1979 in Oldham. He specialised in compensation claims for industrial diseases, such as asbestosis and byssinosis, or brown lung. Pickering retired in 2004. His firm continued to operate under the name The Asbestos Law Partnership (or 'The ALP').