Amanda Brock
General Counsel, Global Switch
Amanda is General Counsel of Global Switch and a European Representative of the Open Invention Network. Having been General Counsel, Canonical – lead commercial sponsor of the open source operating system Ubuntu and open stack cloud partner – for 5 years, where she managed the worldwide legal function. Her experience is diverse, in particular in the technology sector and her expertise includes open source software, cloud computing, big data, IOT, new governance models for co-operation and “open” as well as device manufacture and distribution.
With over 20 years of experience of commercial and IT law her experience lends itself to her very commercial approach to legal advice. This has been primarily in house, including roles as European Manager at DSG International where she was the first lawyer at the ISP, Freeserve (UK’s first and biggest .com IPO), UK Legal Director, Aramark and General Counsel Nicole Farhi & French Connection.
Amanda is as a solicitor, admitted in England and Scotland and has a Masters in IP and IT law from Queen Mary and a Masters in Comparative Jurisprudence from New York University. Amanda is a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary and was a founder of the QM Legal Incubator Q:Legal. She is a Judge and part of the Advisory Board of the UK Open Source Awards.
She has spoken at academic, legal and business conferences internationally and written extensively on open source, tech and commercial law, including being the author of “E-Business: A Practical Guide to the Laws” and having contributed the chapter on commercial agreements to Oxford University Press’s “Free and Open Source Software, Policy, Law and Practice”. She is currently writing a new legal text, “Legal Issues in IoT: Smart Laws for Smart Businesses”, to be published in February 2016.