Legal Practice Companion 2014/15

Montagu and Weston's Legal Practice Companion is firmly established as the leading support title for students undertaking the Legal Practice Course and a much-valued resource for trainees and lawyers in practice.

Gerald Montagu, Partner in the Corporate Tax, Private Client and Tax Disputes group at Stephenson Harwood LLP. He is a member of the Law Society's corporation tax sub-committee and is the editor of the renowned Norfolk and Montagu on the Taxation of Interest and Debt Finance, published by Bloomsbury Professional.

Mark Weston is a partner at Matthew Arnold and Baldwin LLP (www.mablaw.com) where he heads the Commercial/IP/IT team. He joined in 2004 after many years in the Magic Circle law firms.

Expertise: Mark works across all areas of commercial law, information technology (IT) law, intellectual property (IP) law, on-line commerce law, digital law and practice and media law.

Clients: Just some of Mark's more well-known clients include Groupon, RTL Group S.A., Elstree Film Studios, Defaqto, Sanyo, mysupermarket.co.uk, Retailcorp Brands LLC, Maxell, The Gulf Marketing Group, Playboy UK, Imagination Technologies Plc, Europcar, Hilton Hotels, Foreign Currency Direct Plc, and the BBC.

Some detail: Mark has extensive experience in advising clients on all manner of commercial matters (such as business planning and solutions, franchising, distribution, agency and marketing) through branding and intellectual property exploitation and licensing, to advice and documentation regarding hardware and software issues (such as development, licensing, maintenance and distribution, SaaS and cloud, Internet transactional solutioning, B2B, B2C and B2G electronic commerce, outsourcing, facilities management, procurement, IT policies, data protection (privacy) and freedom of information issues). He has a particular expertise in new digital business and revenue streams. He is also experienced in dealing with software disputes and IT litigation. The increasingly extensive media side of his practice relates primarily to publishing (both real world and digital content), to games and gaming platforms (and particularly new transmedia technologies), advising companies about their advertising onscreen, online and in print and managing their public communications strategies generally (dealing with the OFT and ASA in the process) - and also a smattering of television, film and music exploitation.

More unusual:
Mark has previously spent several months on secondment to Hewlett Packard and he has also been seconded to assist in the legal problems arising in new technology companies such as Symbian. From 2000 to 2001, Mark was resident in the Chicago office of Baker & McKenzie advising US clients on European and UK aspects of IT and electronic commerce law and practice.

Mark is Chairman of the Society for Computers & Law (north London & Home Counties Region), Chairman of the Intellectual Property interest group of Lawnet and is a premier member of the Eurojuris Intellectual Property panel. Mark is the author of the Legal Practice Companion, a parallel text book at several law schools, the editor of the IP and Media Law Companion as well as the rest of the Companion series of books published by Bloomsbury Professional, Tottels, Cavendish Publishing and Oxford University Press. He has noted numerous reports for the IT Law Reports and is widely published in Computing, Computers & Law, Computer Law & Security Report, IT Law Today, Intellectual Property World, Solicitors Journal and many other journals both online and offline. Mark has also authored articles syndicated in the national and trade press and is regularly quoted in national newspapers. Mark is the author of the Business Names on the Internet chapter in the PLC Ecommerce Manual as well as numerous other articles on various Commercial & IT law topics. He blogs on the mablaw.com website.

Mark lectures regularly on all Commercial, IP and IT law topics, most recently lecturing at the IBC IT 'Summer School' Programme in Cambridge, England; the Falconbury two-day Commercial Contracts seminars (run four times a year) and IT Contracts seminars (run three times a year) in London; and he has previously lectured at the Annual On-line & Internet Commerce Law Institute seminar in Chicago and tutored at University College London. He also runs a programme of bespoke training schemes on commercial law, IP law and IT law as well as soft skills programmes such as negotiation skills and presentation skills.

Finally, you will have seen that Mark likes blogging and writing books, which are available at all good bookshops! He also appears regularly on BBC1 (usually providing advice on-screen to BBC Watchdog) and also on Sky News as a legal commentator, as well as trying to avoid the huge quantity of pink powder the TV make-up girls want to apply to his increasingly receding hairline.