IT Projects

Our law firm accompanies the IT projects of companies, organizations and institutions from the preparation and review of the specifications and requirements to the acceptance and subsequent software maintenance.

In many cases, the lawyer is involved in ongoing IT projects much too late, namely when none of the contracting parties is willing to negotiate anymore and the failure of the project with subsequent litigation threatens.

However, the expert IT lawyer is not an opponent of the client or the contractor, but a supporter and mediator of both contracting parties and contributes significantly to the success of the IT project. The IT lawyer reviews the specifications and requirements together with both contracting parties and determines the performance and cooperation obligations of the contracting parties by mutual agreement. This saves an enormous amount of time and money. If, in a larger IT project, many additional man-days have to be spent by the contractor or the client to remediate the project due to unclear definition of the contractor’s performance obligations, a lack of contractual change procedures, this is in most cases much more expensive than involving the IT lawyer in the project in time.

The IT lawyer supports and trains the project participants, e.g. with regard to the definition of the performance and cooperation obligations, review of the requirements specification and the specifications, definition of the milestones, implementation of changes in the course of the project, avoidance of acclamation changes, definition, change and adherence to project deadlines, documentation obligations, acceptance and definition of acceptance criteria, warranty and subsequent software maintenance by the contractor.

It is also advantageous that attorney Thomas P. Costard, as an IT lawyer himself, has relevant experience in information technology and has planned, implemented and documented his own IT projects and knows the typical IT project sins. As an expert IT lawyer, he knows the mentality of both the IT specialist and the lawyer and can respond to both groups of people in an expert manner, so that they understand each other and accept the expertise of the other as an enrichment and for the success of the IT project.

Due to the fact that Attorney Costard is both a computer scientist and a lawyer specialized in IT law, he contributes significantly to the success of IT projects and is appreciated by both the lawyers and the computer scientists, and his advice and guidelines are well accepted by the participants of a project.

 

The services provided by the law firm in the field of IT project management include in particular

  • Support in the design of the software project (waterfall model, scrum, definition of sprints, partial acceptances, etc.)
  • Review of the requirements specification and the functional specification within the framework of a software project
  • Definition of milestones
  • Creation of the activity and deadline plan (who does what, with what and by when?)
  • Creation of the IT project contract
  • Accompaniment of the contract negotiations up to the conclusion of the contract
  • Support of the IT project from the planning phase to the realization phase
  • Support of the change management
  • Consulting during the implementation of the migration
  • Support in the creation of the acceptance protocol, definition of test cases
  • Accompaniment of the acceptance and logging of still existing deficiencies
  • Support in planning and implementation of remediation of defects
  • Remediation of IT projects and support of the mediation process
  • Advice on IT security requirements in IT projects (e.g. cloud)
  • Implementation of data protection requirements for IT projects, e.g. in the case of international data transfer
  • Reversal of IT projects and enforcement of contractual penalties and claims for damages out of court and in court

Attorney Costard holds seminars and trainings in the field of IT project management, in particular on the requirements specification and typical project sins.

 

The services of the law firm in the area of software license consulting include in particular

  • As-is analysis of the existing licenses in the company
  • Recording of shortages and surpluses in software licenses
  • Selection of license management software
  • Determination of existing software requirements
  • Examination and comparison of different software license models, especially for Microsoft
  • Consideration of software license models in the context of virtualization
  • Support in setting up valid software license management in the company
  • Review of software vendor license agreements
  • Support with license audits of software manufacturers (Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, etc.)
  • Support of the software rollout in the company

 

Through his training as a Microsoft Licensing Professional (MLP), Attorney Costard knows the software licensing models of Microsoft Inc. particularly well.