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Negotiating and Drafting IT (Information Technology) Contracts Training Course
A two-day seminar designed to explain what IT contracts are, how and why they work and how to put them in place.
Details
Course overview
Understand IT contracts and their complexities to ensure you draft watertight agreements and manage the risks effectively
All those involved in IT transactions need to understand the trends and industry ‘norms’. A tough commercial environment means you need to guarantee you are getting the best terms available and the best deal for your company or clients.This course has been specifically designed to engage both IT supplier and users of IT to develop their understanding of the structure and content of IT contracts:
- What they are
- How and why they work
- What should be included
- How to put them in place
- How to overcome the key challenges
- What the IT (separate from the contract) actually means
This practical and intensive two-day programme will boost your knowledge in these six key areas to ensure you get the deal done with the best terms for your organisation.
Who should attend?
This seminar is designed for representatives from both IT suppliers and users/buyers, including:
- In house lawyers
- Contract managers
- Procurement managers
- Buyers
- IT directors and managers
- Private practice lawyers and IT consultants
Presenter's firm
is a leading and award-winning international law firm with offices in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Piraeus, Singapore, Monaco and Hong Kong. As a full service law firm, it delivers advice and strategic guidance spanning the full legal spectrum from non-contentious advisory and transactional work, to all forms of dispute resolution.
Its commitment is to provide a fast and efficient service wherever its clients operate. As its business has grown and diversified, it has recognised the strength and importance of the principles held by its people; putting clients first and operating as one team to realise its goals and share its success. These principles have formed the foundation of its culture and the way its lawyers interact with one another and the firm’s clients. They are what distinguish it and are vital to its future.
The firm is on the panel of a number of national and international organisations and regularly competes against many of the City firms. In recent months they have been able to win a number of panel reviews against City firms.
Clients of the firm include
• Carrs Milling Industries • Co-operative Group • CRH Group • Elstree Film Studios • Halewood International • Health Education England • Iceland Foods • Johnson & Johnson plc • Lavinia Corporation • Lloyds Bank • National Express • Odeon Cinemas • Peel Group • Stobart Group • United Utilities plc • Zeneca Group.
To find out more out what Hill Dickinson can do for you click HERE.
Programme
Background to an IT contract (pre-contract preparations)
- Part 1: Prevention is better than cure
- Differences in perspectives of IT suppliers and IT customers
- IT contracts words to avoid... and encourage
- Part 2: Preparing to negotiate
- IT tendering and procurement
- Managing IT negotiations
- Pre-contract documents
- Interim agreements and pre-contract contracts
- Structure of IT agreements
- Responsibility for technical schedules
Understanding enough IT to work with IT contracts
- Lawyers vs IT consultants
- Computer architecture
- Storage devices
- Software – what is it?
- Source code vs object code
- Databases
- Classical networks – what are they?
- The Internet
- IP Addressing and DNS
- ASP to Software as a Service (SaaS) to the Cloud
- Virtualisation
- Content and data
- Analogue v digital
- Communications
- Encryption
- AI and machine learning
- Future trends
Software Licences
- Software
- Software licences:
- Background
- Commercial questions
- Goods or Services?
- Express terms:
- Usual restrictions in software licences
- Safeguards against those restrictions
- The effect of the Software Directive
- Warranties to a standard
- Date and currency warranties
- Communicating the licence terms
- Shrink and web-wrapped software
- Maintenance and support adjuncts
- Escrow:
- Source code escrow
- SaaS step-in escrow
Etymology of an IT project: group exercise: Part I
- Waterfall commercials – how to negotiate
Etymology of an IT project: group exercise: Part II
- Waterfall software development
- Waterfall development contracts
Software development
- Agile v Waterfall methodologies
- Crowdsourcing and open source development
- Agile contracts
Software as a Service
- Advantages and disadvantages
- LHA v SaaS agreements
- Customer sensible due diligence
- SaaS agreement:
- Description of services
- Right to use
- Scope of use
- Price
- Other clauses
Copyright and database rights – basic principles (Part 1)
- What is copyright? – and important copyright issues
- Use of the © symbol
- What are database rights?
- Sources of most disputes
- Copyright enforcement bodies
- FAST and the BSA
- Audit clauses
Copyright and database rights – implications for software activities (Part 2)
- Porting software
- Non-textually copying software
- Software patents
- Moral rights in software and typefaces
Outsourcing and IT services contracts
- Overriding principles
- Structures of IT services agreements
- Defining services
- Defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
- Change control and project/system scope creep
- How are IT suppliers managed?
- Supplier warranties vs customer pushbacks
IT Reseller Agreements
- Software distribution: what does the industry do?
- Sales agents
- Sales representatives
- Resellers
- Contracts
Problems with IT contracts
- Typical disputes in IT projects
- Methods of IT dispute resolution and corresponding clauses
- Litigation
- ADR, mediation and arbitration
- Expert determination
- Neutral evaluation
- Ping-pong determination
- Disclosure issues
- Software ownership issues: who owns it?
Open source software
- Open source software
- The rise of OSS
- Historical concepts
- The open source definition
- The trajectory of OSS today
- OSS as an industry
- OSS licences
IT warranties and clauses
- Implied terms:
- Anglo v Winter Brown
- Quality
- Material, substantial or reasonable?
- Anti-virus clauses
- Date issues and clauses
- Comm issues and clauses
- Currency issues and clauses
- Sizing warranties and scalability issues
Presenter
Mark Weston (More...)
Mark Weston is a partner at Hill Dickinson LLP and is the Head of Information Technology, Intellectual Property and Commercial (London). Mark joined the firm from Matthew Arnold and Baldwin LLP where for 12 years he was a partner and Head of the Commercial, Intellectual Property and Information Technology Group, before which he spent several years at Baker McKenzie.
Expertise: Mark’s practice covers both non-contentious and contentious matters in all areas of commercial law, intellectual property law, information technology law, Internet, electronic commerce and on-line services law. He specialises in commercial and Tech issues.
Clients: Just some of Mark’s more well-known clients include Elstree Film Studios, Defaqto, mysupermarket.co.uk, Groupon, RTL Group S.A., Retailcorp Brands LLC, The Gulf Marketing Group, Europcar, Hilton Hotels and the BBC.
Some detail: Mark has extensive experience in advising clients on all manner of commercial matters (such as business planning and solutions, franchising, distribution, agency and marketing) through branding and intellectual property exploitation and licensing, to advice and documentation regarding hardware and software issues (such as development, licensing, maintenance and distribution, SaaS and cloud, Internet transactional solutioning, B2B, B2C and B2G electronic commerce, S-commerce and M-Commerce, social media, outsourcing, facilities management, procurement, IT policies, data protection (privacy), GDPR and freedom of information issues). He has a particular expertise in new digital business and revenue streams. He is also experienced in dealing with software disputes and IT litigation. The increasingly extensive media side of his practice relates primarily to publishing (both real world and digital content), to games and gaming platforms (and particularly transmedia technologies), advising companies about their advertising onscreen, online and in print and managing their public communications strategies generally (dealing with the CMA and ASA in the process) – and also a smattering of television, film and music exploitation.
More unusual:
Mark has previously spent several months on secondment to Hewlett Packard and he has also been seconded to assist in the legal problems arising in new technology companies such as Symbian. From 2000 to 2001, Mark was resident in the Chicago office of Baker & McKenzie advising US clients on European and UK aspects of IT and electronic commerce law and practice.
Mark is the author of the Legal Practice Companion, a parallel text book at several law schools, the editor of the IP and Media Law Companion as well as the rest of the Companion series of books published by Bloomsbury Professional, Tottels, Cavendish Publishing and Oxford University Press. He has noted numerous reports for the IT Law Reports and is widely published in Computing, Computers & Law, Computer Law & Security Report, IT Law Today, Intellectual Property World, Solicitors Journal and many other journals both online and offline. Mark has also authored articles syndicated in the national and trade press and is regularly quoted in national newspapers. Mark is the author of the Business Names on the Internet chapter in the PLC Ecommerce Manual as well as numerous other articles on various Commercial & IT law topics.
Mark lectures regularly on all Commercial, IP and IT law topics, most recently lecturing at the IBC IT ‘Summer School’ Programme in Cambridge, England; the Falconbury two-day and three-day Commercial Contracts seminars (run several times a year) and IT Contracts seminars (run three times a year) in London; and he has previously lectured at the Annual On-line & Internet Commerce Law Institute seminar in Chicago and tutored at University College London. He also runs a programme of bespoke training schemes on commercial law, IP law and IT law as well as soft skills programmes such as negotiation skills and presentation skills.
Finally, you will have seen that Mark likes blogging and writing books, which are available at all good bookshops! He also appears regularly on BBC1 (usually providing advice on-screen to BBC Watchdog) and also on Sky News as a legal commentator, as well as trying to avoid the huge quantity of pink powder the TV make-up girls want to apply to his increasingly receding hairline.
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31 Jan-1 Feb 2022 Face-to-face, (venue not yet confirmed) |
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31 Jan-1 Feb 2022 Face-to-face (venue not yet confirmed) |
GBP 1,299 1,099 EUR 1,819 1,539 USD 2,026 1,714 Until 27 Dec* |
Enrol now
to attend Face-to-face (venue not yet confirmed) Please note: this event is being organised by our training partner Falconbury; clicking Enrol will take you to falconbury.co.uk to complete your purchase. |
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27-28 Apr 2022 Live webinar |
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27-28 Apr 2022 Live webinar |
GBP 1,099 899 EUR 1,579 1,299 USD 1,786 1,474 Until 23 Mar 22* |
Enrol now
to attend Live webinar Please note: this event is being organised by our training partner Falconbury; clicking Enrol will take you to falconbury.co.uk to complete your purchase. |
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11-12 Jul 2022 Face-to-face, (venue not yet confirmed) |
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11-12 Jul 2022 Face-to-face (venue not yet confirmed) |
GBP 1,299 1,099 EUR 1,819 1,539 USD 2,026 1,714 Until 6 Jun 22* |
Enrol now
to attend Face-to-face (venue not yet confirmed) Please note: this event is being organised by our training partner Falconbury; clicking Enrol will take you to falconbury.co.uk to complete your purchase. |
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7-8 Nov 2022 Live webinar |
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7-8 Nov 2022 Live webinar |
GBP 1,099 899 EUR 1,579 1,299 USD 1,786 1,474 Until 3 Oct 22* |
Enrol now
to attend Live webinar Please note: this event is being organised by our training partner Falconbury; clicking Enrol will take you to falconbury.co.uk to complete your purchase. |
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* Note the early booking discount cannot be combined with any other offers or promotional code