Richard Watkinson

Richard specialises in technology and commercial matters and transactions.

He has over 25 years' experience of advising clients across a range of sectors including technology, health, financial services and government. His key clients include Royal Mail Group, EMIS Group, NHS Digital, Lowell Financial and International Personal Finance.

Richard provides clients with the benefit of his deep knowledge and experience of technology sourcing projects, specifically in relation to current trends and best practices in procurement and contracting strategy.

Relevant experience includes:

• Leading the team advising a British-based international provider of home credit and digital loans on its IT transformation programme including the virtualisation of its data centres, implementing cloud-based compute, network and storage infrastructure solutions.
• Advising a state-owned economic development bank in relation to its procurement of a replacement technology platform solution to administer loan finance to smaller businesses.
• Advising a leading provider of credit management services on the procurement of an outsourced telecoms managed service solution including workforce management and speech analytics technologies.
• Advising the UK’s largest clinical systems provider on a "partnership model" commercial contract to enable it to bring quality health apps to primary care practices across England. This ground breaking partnership enabled GPs using our client’s EPR platform to recommend an app in a similar way to prescribing a medicine or other treatment.
• Advising a postal service company on the procurement of an e-commerce shop platform solution.
• Advising an international financial services company on the renegotiation of their outsourced pan European Wide Area Network service with T-Mobile.
• Providing strategic advice to a leading UK teaching hospital in relation to exploiting its homegrown electronic health record solution - an award winning healthcare system.
• Advising a UK insurer on its appointment of a hosted Software-as-a-Service solution for its commercial insurance lines.

Richard is a recognised figure in the technology law arena (with a Band 1 regional ranking in Information Technology) with top listings in the legal directories.

A client says: “He is clearly an expert in his field. He is personable and he gives intelligible and very focused legal advice.”