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Alan Nelson

Office Managing Partner

Portrait ofAlan Nelson

Alan Nelson

Office Managing Partner

Contact
CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang LLP
1 West Regent Street
Glasgow
G2 1AP
United Kingdom
Languages English

Alan Nelson is the Managing Partner of CMS Glasgow and a very experienced IT and information lawyer.

He has advised a large number of public and private sector bodies on a variety of IT, outsourcing deals and significant commercial contracts. He has a particular expertise in the financial services sector.

Over the last 25+ years he has led teams advising clients on some of their most complex high value IT and outsourcing projects.

He is one of only 3 lawyers in Scotland to be in Legal 500’s Hall of Fame for IT and outsourcing work and is Band One ranked by Chambers and Partners for technology and outsourcing work. 

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"Alan's commerciality and pragmatism really sets him apart from others in the field and flows down well into his team."

Chambers

Clients praise his ability "to align himself with our objectives as a business" and consistent desire "to innovate and to improve."

Chambers UK, 2016

"Alan's commerciality and pragmatism really sets him apart from others in the field and flows down well into his team."

Chambers

Clients praise his ability "to align himself with our objectives as a business" and consistent desire "to innovate and to improve."

Chambers UK, 2016

Relevant experience

  • Over the past 10+ years advising the Scottish public sector on procuring the SWAN network, the first significant shared services IT project undertaken in Scotland from Capita and then the re-procurement of those services which was won by BT. Cumulatively the contracts have a value well in excess of GBP 500m.
  • A leading UK bank on its GBP 700m datacentre/infrastructure outsourcing to IBM.
  • A leading UK bank on multiple contracts to support the distribution of insurance products to its customers. 
  • Multiple clients on enterprise wide software and SaaS arrangements. 
  • Scottish Water: principal advisor on the negotiation and implementation of its co-sourcing strategy for its IT function with three suppliers simultaneously (BT, Fujitsu and TCS).
  • The contractual arrangements to support the operation of the largest ATM estate in the UK.
  • The outsourcing of a number of financial services operations including mortgage processing, credit card processing, complaints handling and PPI remediation.
  • A number of clients on large outsourcing projects including with Cognizant, Syntel, Accenture, Infosys, Genpact, BT, Cushman & Wakefield, Mitie and many others. 
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Education

  • 1998 - Dip LP, University of Glasgow, Glasgow.
  • 1997 - LLB (Hons), University of Glasgow, Glasgow.
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Expertise

Feed

10/08/2023
Supporting the FinTech Community – Headline Sponsor of the FinTech Summit...
Scotland has its roots in financial services and is establishing itself as a FinTech hub. The CMS FinTech team works alongside clients at all stages of their lifecycle. We understand FinTech clients, working with many of our existing clients in this space when they were start-ups or scale-ups. We are leading advisors in FinTech, electronic money, distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence, cyber security, privacy, and the use of social media by financial institutions. The FinTech ecosystem in Scotland continues to grow at pace, and CMS is committed to supporting Scotland's world class FinTechs. We were delighted to be the headline sponsor at the 2023 FinTech Summit.
Publication
15/11/2022
Twenty's Plenty: Freedom of Information reform, twenty years on?
Twenty years since the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 was introduced, a consultation based on a proposed Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill has been launched (closing on 02 February...
Law-Now Sustainability
01/09/2022
Critical Third Parties to the financial services sector discussion paper...
Minimum resilience standards for CTPs The paper discusses the FSM Bill’s proposal to allow supervisory authorities to create the rules for CTPs setting out the expected resilience standards and associated...
Regzone Financial Services & Regulation
31/08/2022
Critical Third Parties to the financial services sector discussion paper...
Background Following a recent Law-Now on this topic which focused on HMT’s confirmation that it will legislate to permit financial regulators to directly oversee and supervise (previously unregulated)...
Law-Now Banking & Finance
16/06/2021
Rebound & Remodel: Scotland's road to recovery
Much of our attention has turned to Scotland’s road to recovery post pandemic, post-Brexit and post-election.  As a nation, Scotland is still addressing a catastrophic pandemic and is in the midst of an uncertain economic landscape ahead. It is dealing with the UK’s exit from the EU and the recent Scottish general election, which has firmed up the prospect of another independence referendum in the medium term.  
Publication
23/04/2021
The Road to COP26: Our 101 on COP26
COP26 is scheduled to take place from Monday 1st November – Friday 12th November 2021 in Glasgow. It was originally intended to take place last November but was postponed due to COVID-19. It brings...
Law-Now Sustainability
15/01/2021
Law and regulation of force majeure in Scotland
1. Is there legislation on force majeure in your law system? No. The term “force majeure” has no recognised meaning in Scottish law and should therefore only be used in agreements when it is properly...
Expert Guide Commercial
10/11/2020
Risk Essentials: Future Facing Commercial Contracts
In this webinar, we will take a look at some significant trends and issues facing commercial contract parties in the post-COVID world. Good faith case update: a number of recent court decisions have focused...
Event Webinar
01/10/2020
Scotland: Building opportunities
CMS Scotland worked with a number of key industry leaders and surveyed over 100 executives of four of Scotland’s most important future industry sectors to create our Thought Leadership report Scotland:...
Publication
29/06/2020
The importance of Knowledge in claims of misuse of confidential information
In the case of Media Entertainment NV v Karyagdyyev and another [2020] EWHC 1138 (QB), the High Court distinguished between the requirement for a defendant’s “sufficient” knowledge when seeking...
Law-Now Public Procurement
15/05/2020
Negotiating Service Level / KPI and other reliefs in your services and...
The fast introduction and phased release of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions has led to many businesses struggling to manage loss of capacity and efficiency. In the initial days and weeks of the pandemic...
Law-Now Coronavirus (COVID-19)
03/03/2020
Living Wills in Outsourcing Arrangements
There have been many high profile, and countless other, examples of outsourcing firms struggling, or even failing, over the last few years. As a consequence of this and the growing complexity of business...
Publication
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