Bristows is the ‘go-to’ firm for IT & Digital for clients who want responsive, thoughtful and pragmatic legal advice. We cover everything from apps to e-commerce, platform development to cloud, and blockchain to artificial intelligence. Our tech-savvy team is as comfortable handling the roll-out of a huge digital transformation project as it is advising on the compliance of a new AI product for one of the tech giants. Whatever it is, we have the lawyers who can assist.
Our focus on the technology sector makes us the lawyers of choice for many of the world’s largest technology companies. However, our clients include sophisticated buyers of technology too, and we are regularly asked to advise on business-critical projects and digital transformations as new technology disrupts traditional business models. We can advise on regulatory compliance, draft and negotiate whatever contracts are required and help clients to manage risks, disputes or ‘troubled projects’.
Many of the IT & Digital projects we get involved in require us to have a deep understanding of the technology involved. Whatever it is – cloud computing, Adtech, the internet of things, AI and machine learning – we have lawyers who are interested and knowledgeable in how it all works. And if we do come across a technology we haven’t had to think about before, we have enough lawyers with science and engineering backgrounds (many at doctorate level) to figure it out. As the world becomes more connected and technology even more pervasive, our understanding of how technology works gives us an edge.
While we have one of the largest teams of IT & Digital specialists around, Bristows is still of a size and managed in a way that encourages cooperation and interdisciplinary working. For our clients, this means not only is the best expertise always brought to bear on a particular matter, but we can quickly pull together diverse teams with the necessary mix of expertise from across the firm, be that tax, employment, regulatory, litigation or another discipline a particular project raises.
Open source software is everywhere, and it’s difficult to imagine any major technology product or business that isn’t dependent on it. Bristows has deep knowledge experience in open source software licensing, compliance and regulation. Members of our open source team have drafted some of the most influential open licences, participated in the development of ISO open source standards and advised on open source risk in major M&A transactions, business startups, and numerous product launches.
Much of our work is international, either because our client is overseas, or because the project itself involves the laws of many countries, such as where a client is rolling out a new global IT system or releasing a new feature to an online service. We handle these projects using a network of the best IT & Digital lawyers around. We are not constrained in who we can work with and have spent years identifying lawyers around the world who work like we do – knowledgeably, pragmatically and cost-effectively. But we also know it’s not enough to work with the best lawyers, and we also offer our clients the convenience of ‘one firm’ – one set of instructions, one conflict check and one invoice.
