McDermott to advise on e-banking

The London office of Chicago firm McDermott Will & Emery is setting up a new practice group to advise investment banks on e-commerce work.

The group, dubbed the financial markets technology practice, will be cross-disciplinary and will include US-based lawyers even though it is headed out of London. It will advise financial services institutions, software providers and electronic commerce companies on big-ticket technology projects in financial markets.

It will be run jointly by head of banking Graham Rowbotham and head of intellectual property and IT Phillip Rees, who used to be the senior technology counsel for Europe at Citibank.

Rees says: "When I came back into private practice, one of the issues was creating a specialist cross-departmental group. For the last two years Graham and I have been working on putting it together."

The firm's clients on this sort of work include the likes of Salomon Smith Barney, Citibank, Industrial Bank of Japan and Lloyds TSB.