For the occasion of its first meeting in the East Midlands in recent memory, the SCL Midlands Group enjoyed a memorable talk by John Yates on the legal aspects of outsourcing – Losing your shirt on the outsourcing lottery. Nottingham Law School kindly allowed us to use their Taylor building for the meeting.
John is well known as a member of the SCL’s Council and Legal Editor of Computers &Law. He is also a partner in Oxley & Coward of Rotherham which he readily admits is not a town where one would normally expect to find a specialist in IT law – particularly one who has advised the likes of Cap Gemini on a deal with British Steel. He said his objectives were to help us to understand the basic elements of an outsourcing deal, the commercial objectives of the deal and the key areas of legal and commercial risk. He managed to do this while entertaining us and keeping interested both the specialist IT lawyers and those who were new to the subject.
We hope to hold some further meetings in Nottingham as well as our usual location, Birmingham, so as to make it easier for more group members to attend meetings. Our next meeting is planned for Birmingham on Tuesday 8 September when Lexology will show us the new practice management software which was one of the finalists for the 1997 SCL IT award.
