Squire Sanders Hammonds is boosting its Intellectual Property & Technology team in London with the appointment of IT and outsourcing expert, Garfield Smith.
Garfield Smith has joined Squire Sanders Hammonds from Pinsent Masons, where he was a partner for four years and headed up the firm’s financial services outsourcing practice group. He was also the firm’s client relationship partner for BP, AIG and QBE Insurance, having acted for all three for a number of years.
Garfield is recognized by legal directories Chambers & Partners and Legal 500 as one of the world’s leading outsourcing lawyers. He advises on strategically important major onshore, offshore business process, transformation and IT outsourcing projects. Recently he has spent time advising a number of the world’s largest companies on a number of significant, high profile and complex outsourcing transactions, particularly in the insurance and financial services sectors. Most notably Garfield led a team of 20 lawyers advising a multinational business on its second generation global HR outsourcing deal worth in excess of $2 billion. The deal was the largest ever HR transformation in the world, involving the provision of services to over 100,000 employees globally. It was also the first significant multi-process second generation HR outsourcing deal. He is well known for his ability to build relationships, the legal 500 saying of him this year (2011), “particularly strong on the strategic side, and invests considerable time and effort in building up effective long term relationships”.
Commenting on his appointment, Garfield Smith said: “I am very excited to join Squire Sanders Hammonds. The firm’s global platform together with its strong US base made perfect sense. International strength is critical to supporting and developing my practice both from a large deal and client development perspective. It’s great to be working again with some old friends too.”
Carl Rohsler, European leader of the Intellectual Property & Technology practice, said: “I have known Garfield for many years. He is a highly motivated and talented partner with a track record of building international client relationships, which makes him a good cultural fit with our existing team. Garfield brings with him some significant blue chip clients that we are confident will be very well supported by our international network.”
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