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 digital transformation, system development to outsourcing, and block chain to artificial intelligence. Our tech-savvy team is as comfortable handling the roll-out of a huge government IT project as it is advising on the compliance of a new global service 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 for IT & Digital legal advice include sophisticated buyers of technology too, and we are regularly asked to advise on business-critical projects, such as digital transformations and strategic outsourcing. We can advise on regulatory compliance, draft and negotiate whatever contracts are required and even help clients get ‘troubled projects’ back on track if things go wrong, as they sometimes do.
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, robotics – 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 or another discipline a particular project raises.
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.