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Falconbury

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.

22 July 2024 / 29 July 2024
+ 8-9 October 2024 »
from £999

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Format: Live online, Classroom
CPD: 12 hours for your records
Certificate of completion

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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 suppliers 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.

Please note: When attending the online version of this course, participants are required to join with the ability to turn on their cameras. This is an essential requirement in order to fully participate in the training course due to the interactive nature of the programme.

This training course is part of our Commercial Contracts Training Course collection which has been designed for the in-house lawyer.

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

Weston Legal is a leading specialist boutique firm specialising in Commercial law, Technology law, Media law, Intellectual Property law, Data law and Regulatory law and practice. From its founding, the firm has always committed 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.

To find out more out what Weston Legal can do for you, please contact Mark at mark at westonlegal.ltd or see https://uk.linkedin.com/in/markwestonlegal

Mark also operates as a leading consultant to Hill Dickinson LLP, a leading and award-winning international law firm with offices in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, 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. 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.

To find out more out what Mark can do for you via Hill Dickinson, please contact him via www.hilldickinson.com

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The Negotiating and Drafting IT Contracts course will cover:

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

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Mark Weston
Sederby Consulting Limited

Mark Weston has run his own law firm, Weston Legal, since 1 January 2024. He is also a consultant at Hill Dickinson LLP where he joined in February 2016 as a partner and Head of its Commercial, TMT & IP Practice. Before that, he was a partner and Head of the Commercial/IP/IT Team at Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP and before that, he spent several years at Baker & McKenzie in London and Chicago and has also previously been seconded to Hewlett Packard and other technology businesses. He changed role to become a consultant in Hill Dickinson’s London office in January 2024.

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. Mark is used as a ‘trusted adviser’ by many clients in all sorts of businesses and often acts as ‘private practice in-house counsel’ for many clients. He specialises in tech and internet businesses.

Clients: Just some of Mark’s more well-known clients include Elstree Film Studios, RTL Group S.A., Sykes Cottages, Retailcorp Brands LLC, The Gulf Marketing Group, Moneynetint Limited 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 as well as artificial intelligence (AI)). 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. Recently he has been very active in AI advice.

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 used 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 and is heard on radio as an expert in his fields. 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, including at the IBC IT ‘Summer School’ Programme in Cambridge, England; the Falconbury and MBL 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, IT law, AI law and data law as well as soft skills programmes such as negotiation skills and presentation skills.

Finally, you may 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.

More details

NEW higher discounts for multiple bookings - bring your colleagues to make your training budget go further:

30% off the 2nd delegate*
40% off the 3rd delegate*
50% off the 4th delegate*

Please contact us for pricing if you are interested in booking 5 or more delegates

22 July 2024 &
29 July 2024

(Non-consecutive days)

Live online

09:30-17:00 UK (London) (UTC+01)
10:30-18:00 Paris (UTC+02)
04:30-12:00 New York (UTC-04)
Course code 13951

GBP 999 1,199
EUR 1,439 1,719
USD 1,647 1,959

Until 17 Jun

Limited places remaining

2 days live online training
Browser-based, no download usually required
See presenters and interact with fellow attendees
Download documentation and certification of completion
Fair transfer and cancellation policy

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Not ready to book yet?

for 7 days, no obligation

8-9 October 2024

Classroom
Rembrandt Hotel
London

09:00-17:00 UK (London)
Course code 13781
Optional £240/€312/$360 per night

GBP 1,199 1,399
EUR 1,729 2,009
USD 1,977 2,289

Until 03 Sep

2 days classroom-based training
Optional accommodation - 2 nights including breakfast, checking in the day before the course
Meet presenters and fellow attendees in person
Lunch and refreshments provided
Download documentation and certification of completion
Fair transfer and cancellation policy

View basket

Not ready to book yet?

for 7 days, no obligation

* Early booking discounts may not be combined with other discounts or offers. As such, the discounts for 2nd/3rd/4th delegates are based on the full price; and apply only when booking multiple delegates on the same date.