Lisa Hubbard was for many years one of Sotheby's senior international jewellery specialists, with a career at the auction house spanning several decades and including senior roles in the firm's North American and international jewellery operations. She is one of the recognised expert voices in the international jewellery auction market and her name has appeared in the published catalogues, press communications and expert commentary surrounding many of Sotheby's notable jewellery sales.

The expert role at the major international auction houses has a particular character: the specialist is responsible for the identification, attribution, condition assessment, cataloguing and pre-sale valuation of consigned jewellery, and is also the firm's relationship interface with both consigning families and bidding clients. The reputation of any individual specialist accumulates over a career through consistent attribution accuracy, sound valuations, and the ability to handle complex provenance histories. Hubbard's work over a long career across several jewellery categories, including signed twentieth-century work and major coloured-stone and diamond consignments, established her as one of the principal voices in the discipline.

For a working dealer or collector, the names of the senior jewellery specialists at the major auction houses are part of the navigational infrastructure of the trade: knowing who has handled a comparable lot in the recent past is part of how one calibrates an asking position or a bidding limit. Hubbard's record at Sotheby's is part of that institutional memory.