Biography
Charles Drayson, Director & Solicitor
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Charles Drayson founded The Contracts Team after his experience of being General Counsel for Ceridian, a business process outsourcing organisation in the HR sector. Charles spent seven years developing a new approach to commercial contracts and realised that other organisations had similar challenges.
In 2006, Charles was awarded the Legal IT Award for Mitigating Risk Through the Use of IT.
He is a member of the Society for Computers and Law (SCL) and has long had an interest in the use of technology in the practice of law. He is also a member of the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM).
He is now a director of The Contracts Team.
Charles trained and started work as a solicitor in 1993 with one of the leading London law firms, Lovells. He worked in London and Hong Kong and he initially specialised in shipping and international trade litigation. Charles subsequently worked for national commercial law firm, Eversheds, where in 1998 he started working on IT and business process outsourcing projects.
In addition to UK projects, Charles has undertaken projects in Europe, North America and the Middle East.
Example projects include:
- Outsourcing mainframe processing, web application hosting, WAN and print services to one of the global IT service providers (acting for the customer)
- Advice on optimising a first generation IT outsourcing agreement between a one of the high street banks and a global IT services provider (acting for the bank)
- Creating a suite of agreements to enable the multi-party collaboration across 43 countries of payroll processing services
- 7 years of negotiating outsourcing and other commercial agreements for Ceridian (including agreements with several high street banks, numerous major retailers, merchant banks). Charles was responsible for over 7,000 commercial contracts during his time at Ceridian
- Software development contracts
- Business/company acquisitions
- Data protection advice for the offshore data processing
Partly as a result of his legal experience, but also because he has an interest in the underlying subject matter, Charles is able to deploy a deep understanding of technology and associated services and risks including networks, software development, database design, web technologies.
In addition to legal skills, Charles’ previous role as a board member gave him responsibility for security and risk management, internal audit (including Sarbanes Oxley control audits, BSI audits and IT security), and corporate governance.
Charles created The Contracts Team to bring together a group of people from various disciplines to make further advances in relation to business-to-business contracts and disrupt some of the established orthodoxies about the role of both lawyers and non-lawyers.
Outside of work, Charles is a yacht skipper for the offshore sailing branch of the Scout Association. With much less proficiency, he skis and is learning to play the keyboard.
