Robert Court

Rob Court is a senior information technology and commercial lawyer at Harper James Solicitors.

Rob started out at Macfarlanes LLP before moving in-house, gaining experience in the Energy and Utilities sector at a subsidiary of United Utilities PLC, as well as Telecommunications and IT sectors.

Before joining us, Rob spent 13 years working as in-house counsel for one of Europe’s largest privately owned IT reseller and service aggregators.

His time was spent predominantly advising upon, drafting and negotiating terms of business in relation to the supply of software, hardware and IT services to blue chip institutions, household and high street name customers, public sector bodies and SMEs as well as negotiating terms of supply with software vendors, manufacturers, resellers and distributors.

Since qualifying as a solicitor in 2002, Rob has gained extensive experience in relation to the following types of agreements and is well placed to provide practical, commercial advice on commercial transactions to clients from a range of sectors.

• NDAs/confidentiality agreements;
• heads of terms;
• terms and conditions of business predominantly relating hardware and/or software sales;
• software licences and enterprise agreements;
• distribution agreements and value added reseller agreements;
• sub-contracting agreements;
• medium to large scale outsourcing deals
• cloud and data centre service agreements
• professional service agreements including transformations, installations and migrations;
• managed service agreements including break/fix and service desk agreements;

A selection of noteworthy deals includes:

• £24m nationwide managed services outsourcing agreement (railway operator);
• £4m project installation, migration and ongoing managed services agreement (UK charity);
• £36m 10 year hardware maintenance agreement; (household name gaming company)
• £60m 5 year global software supply agreement; (global pharmaceutical);
• £10m software supply agreement (global courier company)

In his spare time, Rob writes, follows football, enjoys cooking, gardening and taking his Labrador on long walks in the countryside.