Chris is a highly experienced solicitor, with in-depth experience gained from working in roles which include: Strategic Procurement & Outsourcing Leader at one of the Big 4 professional services firms; Head of Legal for Technology & Broadcast Operations at one of the UK’s biggest broadcasters; and significant top-tier private practice experience.
Chris provides legal and commercial advice to a wide variety of clients, with a particular focus on strategically important contracts for technology enabled businesses.
Throughout his career, Chris has advised clients seeking to implement some of the most innovative, high profile and high value outsourcing projects of the time. He has also worked with many fast growth technology companies. Both are particular areas of interest.
Some career highlights include:
- Acting as primary legal advisor for one of the world’s largest fast-moving consumer goods companies on many of its high value, global contracts, including drafting and negotiating strategic SaaS, PaaS, software development, marketing and other outsourcing agreements.
- Advising The Business Banking Resolution Service, an entity funded by the seven major UK banks, to create and facilitate a dispute resolution service for disputes between banks and small to medium sized enterprises. This was a high-profile scheme, with parliamentary oversight, subject to much public scrutiny. Chris was a key part of a large multidisciplinary team and led both the commercial and procurement legal workstreams.
- Acting for various SaaS suppliers in relation to their customer agreements and data protection issues, including: (i) an FCA regulated platform in the ECM / trading market; (ii) a well-known payment collections platform; (iii) a global platform used by businesses to produce their marketing materials; and (iv) a specialist provider of automated payment validation solutions that enables its clients to lower the cost of payment processing, by improving straight through processing rates.
- Advising The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants on a first generation high-value IT outsourcing project, provided to US and UK based users from offshore service centres.
- Acting for The Irish Government’s Department of Education, in relation to two high-value and high-profile public procurement exercises: (i) to procure a new payroll system for use by approximately 3,700 schools / 150,000 staff / payees in Ireland; and (ii) to procure a new finance shared services solution for use by the Education and Training Boards in Ireland.
- Advising a US based company on a $60m+ / two-year agreement in relation to blockchain validator services.
- Advising various well-known data centres, which provide services to companies such as Microsoft, Google and AWS, in relation to a range of commercial contracts which underpin their day-to-day operations.
- Providing fractional General Counsel services to a broad range of SMEs, on a flexible retainer basis, enabling those businesses to grow with the peace of mind that measures have been put in place to help them stop falling foul of any legal issues which may make any future funding rounds or sale of the business more challenging.
