Technology contracts carry legal risk that is easy to miss if you are reading them at the wrong level of abstraction. A SaaS agreement that looks standard often contains a clause permitting the provider to train on your data, or a liability cap that effectively eliminates your right of recovery for a significant AI error. An open source licence buried inside a development project can create obligations on your whole codebase.

The technology law work I do sits where the legal and technical meet. It is for businesses building or procuring technology — and for organisations trying to understand what they have agreed to and what they are exposed to. It includes:

• Technology contracts – SaaS agreements, software licences, API terms, development agreements. Reviewed, drafted, or negotiated. The goal is a contract that works commercially and legally, not a mark-up exercise.
• Risk assessments – we know the drill – you can’t always negotiate a contract with a huge multinational tech company. Straightforward risk reviews, helping you understand which risks are worth taking, and which could land you in deep water, or prevent you from scaling.
• (Soft) IP – ownership of developed code and creative output, assignments, licensing, open source compliance, and advice on how to protect your early stage business. In larger organisations, this can be particularly relevant where development is outsourced or uses AI-assisted tools. We don’t do patents or act as trade mark agents.
• Data obligations in technology — privacy by design, processor agreements, data provisions in supplier contracts, cross-border transfer mechanisms. There is very little tech that doesn’t collect some data along the way.
• Internet regulation, e-commerce and online safety – just because you can do almost anything online, and most things pretty anonymously, doesn’t mean you should. And if you’re dealing with consumers it’s never been easier to start selling, and trickier to make sure you’re doing it in the right way.