TMT Team of the Year

The winner of this category must demonstrate market-leading commercial or regulatory expertise through advice on a specific, high -profile IP, technology and media case or transaction. Judges will look for outcomes that deliver the right result for clients.

Previous Winners:

YouView, formerly known as Project Canvas, is a joint venture comprising the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, BT, TalkTalk, Arqiva and Channel 5 that offers an open TV platform for viewers to stream on-demand content from a number of providers from a single source. As far as projects in the broadcasting sector go, it doesn’t come much bigger than this, which is why it was a significant coup for Field Fisher Waterhouse to win the instruction wholesale.

The parties took the unusual step of not engaging separate firms but instead instructing Blankfield’s team to work closely with each of the parties’ in-house teams with a view to achieving consensus on a series of highly complex issues. The project, described as a ‘game-changer for content providers’, was cleared by Ofcom in autumn 2010 and is set to go live in 2011.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

DLA PIPER

Mark Crichard

DLA Piper’s considerable outsourcing expertise was fully in evidence when the team advised King’s College Hospital NHS Trust on its landmark £300m, ten-year, three-way joint venture with Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Serco. The resulting joint venture, GSTS Pathology, will carry out some three million tests a year for King’s alone and is now the UK’s largest provider of pathology services.

Nabarro

Peter Fitzpatrick

Nabarro’s team demonstrated its talent on high-profile disputes by winning a High Court judgment that released clients Etihad Airways and Aldar Properties from their sponsorship deal with the Force India Formula One motor racing team. Etihad and Aldar were represented by another firm in the original High Court proceedings, meaning Fitzpatrick had to show considerable flair and tenacity to hit the ground running and devise a fresh and persuasive approach.

Olswang

Stephen Hermer

2010 featured two headline deals tailor-made for Olswang’s strength in combining an impressive corporate team with unrivalled understanding of key regulatory issues affecting independent broadcasters. The firm first advised RDF Media Group and its management shareholders on its takeover by Zodiak Entertainment, before representing Shed management on Shed’s £100m MBO by Warner Bros.

Reed Smith

Gregor Pryor

Reed Smith’s excellent TMT team has a long-established reputation for acting for broadcasting clients and 2010 was a standout year, with 69 new client wins and a 27% leap in fee income. Standout matters included advising RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster, and four copyright licensing bodies on the arrangements for the retransmission of RTÉ television channels on Virgin Media’s cable network in Northern Ireland.

Slaughter and may

David Ives

In a deal forged between Malaysia and Silicon Valley, Ives provided critical advice to YTL Communications on an agreement to license and develop patented technology and software owned by Sezmi Corporation to build the world’s first wireless hybrid broadcast – a broadband TV and internet content delivery platform using the 4G wireless network being rolled out by YTL across Malaysia.

Speechly Bircham

Alexander Carter-Silk

In a landmark case that has significant implications for the software marketplace, Carter-Silk’s team secured a High Court victory for UK-based client World Programming in a David v Goliath battle against US software giant SAS. The case established that copyright protected the source code of SAS’s system as a literary work, but replicating the functions of the software did not infringe that copyright.