Graham Cunningham > Gatehouse Chambers > London, England > Barrister Profile

Graham Cunningham

Position

Graham is an unregistered barrister.  He is also part of the Gatehouse Chambers Alumni.

Graham spent the first part of his career as a lawyer in industry. He specialised in intellectual property licensing and technology transfer for US multinational ITT Corporation. He then spent 10 years with the UK subsidiary of Wang Laboratories Inc, a well-known computer company in the 1980s. He was the first in-house lawyer, with responsibility primarily for establishing the legal department and for commercial transactions. He then became the legal director and company secretary and was a member of the management team for several years. Lengthy in-house experience allowed him to bring a broad commercial perspective to his work at the Bar and he was mentioned as an IT junior over many years in the Chambers UK directory. He returned to practice in 1994.

Graham’s career spanned a wide range of contentious and non-contentious work in:

Information Technology: including hardware and software procurement, software licensing, outsourcing, turnkey projects, systems integration, support and maintenance issues, software development, website development,  and cloud computing.

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce)

Telecommunications: including radio communications, broadcasting, regulatory and commercial work. He was seconded for several months to a new telecommunications company as it was building out its network, has drafted several telecommunications laws, advised on commercial and regulatory matters in the UK, and handled complex telecoms litigation.

Data Protection and Freedom of Information

Intellectual Property: including database rights, copyright, trade marks, service marks, passing off, design rights, domain names, cybersquatting, breach of confidence, counterfeit goods and merchandising.

Research & Development and Technology Transfer

UK/EU Trading and Commercial Agreements: including franchising, sales and purchase, licensing distribution, joint ventures, leasing and hiring, commercial agents, and consumer credit. He has particular interest in franchising issues and has been regularly involved in this area as adviser, principal counsel, mediation advocate, mediator and junior counsel to Nigel Jones QC.

Utilities: especially sector reform and regulation in water and energy, transport and communications, including legislative drafting to support the creation of regulatory bodies.

UK/EU Competition Laws related to the above issues.

Graham is an accredited mediator (see his separate Mediator Profile). He also has experience of Early Neutral Evaluation (ENE) work – eg a dispute between a high street bank and a major telecommunications provider concerning international data transfer by satellite.

Languages

Basic French.

Memberships

COMBAR

Education

• LLB (Honours)
• CEDR Accredited Mediator