Bill Singleton, Partner

Expertise

Bill is a partner in our intellectual property, communications and technology team.

He has dual qualifications in IT and law and is admitted to practice both as a lawyer and an IT professional. This means that Bill’s ICT qualifications and experience have been independently validated by the Australian Computer Society, allowing him to advise on both legal and IT aspects of technology procurement.

Bill has 15 years of experience in the IT industry, including as a senior executive in a multinational telecommunications company. For the past 7 years, Bill has acted for government and corporates almost exclusively in relation to IT and Internet procurement. Bill specalises in technology transactions, IP licensing and Internet issues.

Areas of practice

• Information and communications technology procurement
• IP protection and licensing
• Internet, privacy and e-business

Qualifications

• Juris Doctor, University of Queensland
• Graduate Diploma Professional Legal Education and Training, University of Queensland
• Bachelor of Science, London

Recent projects

Some of the matters Bill has recently been involved in are:

• Acting for several large Queensland based corporate and government clients on significant IT procurement projects including drafting RFT conditions, contract documentation and schedules, vendor negotiations and contract performance disputes. During the last 7 years, Bill and his team have averaged approximately 10 significant IT projects per year, including:
  • licensing, implementation and support of core business systems (SAP, Aurion, Mincom eclipse, JD Edwards, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, IBM) and industry specific information systems and enterprise systems (up to 60,000 users);
  • enterprise licensing including Microsoft, IBM and Google;
  • RFT and customer contract development for a major public transport real time passenger system;
  • enterprise telecoms including voice, data and mobile, including outsourcing of facilities management and billing;
  • web services including hosting, web development, web security (including pen testing) and web metrics;
  • hard (component, function and system) and soft (ROI, user satisfaction and transfer of risk) Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and SLA (including service credit/debit) development, drafting and implementation; and
  • development of flexible RFT, RFI and response documentation and the integration of these into the contract in a legally effective manner.
• Acting for a large Queensland utility company in:
  • negotiating and documenting cloud computing agreements with Google (including in relation to security, availability, latency, peering and contention SLAs);
  • negotiating, documenting and contract management of enterprise licensing – Microsoft, Google and business specific systems; and
  • research agreements, funding agreements, technology acquisition agreements and technology integration agreements for a patented technology.
• Acting for several medium cap Australian listed and unlisted corporates in acquisition of data centre services, software licensing, implementation and support, outsourcing, security services, SAP Basis services, offshoring, telecoms, open source services.
• Ancillary IT transactional agreements including teaming agreements, deed polls, confidentiality agreements, performance guarantees, financial securities, deed of variation, letter of intent, privacy agreements, IP assignment agreements. IP licensing and many others.
• IT due diligence, advice and drafting in relation to several M&A transactions, including acquisition of a large Queensland based IT company by private equity and drafting of transition services agreements and operational agreements for the 2010 separation of a large Queensland public transport organisation.
• IT dispute services including notices of breach, advice on commercial settlements and IT advice in relation to breach of SLAs and strategic management of suppliers for corporate and government clients.
• IP services including trade mark advice and monitoring services, trade make oppositions and disputes and advice in relation to web terms and conditions and web privacy.

Professional memberships

• Queensland Law Society
• Senior Member of the Australian Computer Society (MACS) (Snr)

Contact

Email     bill.singleton@hyneslawyers.com.au
Phone    07 3828 5541