The Mini MBA for In-house Lawyers Summer School Training Course

Hélène Russell, founder of The Knowledge Business, is a UK solicitor (non-practising) and specialist in Knowledge, Learning and Innovation. After 8 years in practice, primarily in clinical negligence litigation defence, she has worked as a self-employed knowledge management consultant for 13 years. Hélène specialises in practical tools to improve the efficiency and profitability of real-life law firms.

Hélène has extensive experience in business strategy, project management and teaching leadership skills. She runs a popular 'KM Strategy + coaching' course in UK and has written short form and lengthy strategies for a variety of law firms, as well, of course, as writing her own business’s strategy. Hélène has spoken at various events, including Ark’s KM Legal, Lexpo-18, for UWE, St Andrew’s University, BLS and Allice, and chaired international conferences.

She runs a global online KM training and networking group and is a core committee member organising the annual UK Knowledge Mobilisation Conference and Chair of CILIP’s Knowledge and Information Management Special Interest Group. Hélène has an executive MBA with distinction (which included a strategy module), and she is the sole author of two textbooks, contributor to five of Ark’s multi-author books and is currently contracted to Facet Publishing to write a handbook on KM Strategy.

Rupert Hawke, founder of Hawke Legal, has a business degree and is a qualified management accountant. He spent the first 10 years of his career working in multi-national business. In 2007 he was appointed Finance Director of Cartwright King Solicitors – then a regional East Midlands firm. Firstly as FD and then as Managing Director (appointed 2013), Rupert oversaw CK’s journey to becoming a national law firm with 18 offices nationwide offering a wide range of legal services and renowned for a great culture, quality staff, and cutting edge IT systems.

Through his wide-ranging managerial experience in the legal sector, Rupert is a leading authority on law firm financial / strategic management and its application, and has contributed to numerous publications and spoken widely including for The Law Society.

After 12 years at Cartwright King Rupert decided he wanted a new challenge and started Rupert Hawke Legal – a consultancy that utilises the mass of experience and contacts Rupert has developed in his leading role in the legal sector.

Mark Weston has run his own law firm, Weston Legal, since 1 January 2024. He is also a consultant at Hill Dickinson LLP where he joined in February 2016 as a partner and Head of its Commercial, TMT & IP Practice. Before that, he was a partner and Head of the Commercial/IP/IT Team at Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP and before that, he spent several years at Baker & McKenzie in London and Chicago and has also previously been seconded to Hewlett Packard and other technology businesses. He changed role to become a consultant in Hill Dickinson’s London office in January 2024.

Expertise: Mark’s practice covers both non-contentious and contentious matters in all areas of commercial law, intellectual property law, information technology law, Internet, electronic commerce and on-line services law. He specialises in commercial and Tech issues. Mark is used as a ‘trusted adviser’ by many clients in all sorts of businesses and often acts as ‘private practice in-house counsel’ for many clients. He specialises in tech and internet businesses.

Clients: Just some of Mark’s more well-known clients include Elstree Film Studios, RTL Group S.A., Sykes Cottages, Retailcorp Brands LLC, The Gulf Marketing Group, Moneynetint Limited and the BBC.

Some detail: Mark has extensive experience in advising clients on all manner of commercial matters (such as business planning and solutions, franchising, distribution, agency and marketing) through branding and intellectual property exploitation and licensing, to advice and documentation regarding hardware and software issues (such as development, licensing, maintenance and distribution, SaaS and cloud, Internet transactional solutioning, B2B, B2C and B2G electronic commerce, S-commerce and M-Commerce, social media, outsourcing, facilities management, procurement, IT policies, data protection (privacy), GDPR and freedom of information issues as well as artificial intelligence (AI)). He has a particular expertise in new digital business and revenue streams. He is also experienced in dealing with software disputes and IT litigation. The increasingly extensive media side of his practice relates primarily to publishing (both real world and digital content), to games and gaming platforms (and particularly transmedia technologies), advising companies about their advertising onscreen, online and in print and managing their public communications strategies generally (dealing with the CMA and ASA in the process) – and also a smattering of television, film and music exploitation. Recently he has been very active in AI advice.

More unusual: 

Mark has previously spent several months on secondment to Hewlett Packard and he has also been seconded to assist in the legal problems arising in new technology companies such as Symbian. From 2000 to 2001, Mark was resident in the Chicago office of Baker & McKenzie advising US clients on European and UK aspects of IT and electronic commerce law and practice.

Mark is the author of the Legal Practice Companion, a parallel text book used at several law schools, the editor of the IP and Media Law Companion as well as the rest of the Companion series of books published by Bloomsbury Professional, Tottels, Cavendish Publishing and Oxford University Press. He has noted numerous reports for the IT Law Reports and is widely published in Computing, Computers & Law, Computer Law & Security Report, IT Law Today, Intellectual Property World, Solicitors Journal and many other journals both online and offline. Mark has also authored articles syndicated in the national and trade press and is regularly quoted in national newspapers and is heard on radio as an expert in his fields. Mark is the author of the Business Names on the Internet chapter in the PLC Ecommerce Manual as well as numerous other articles on various Commercial & IT law topics.

Mark lectures regularly on all Commercial, IP and IT law topics, including at the IBC IT ‘Summer School’ Programme in Cambridge, England; the Falconbury and MBL two-day and three-day Commercial Contracts seminars (run several times a year) and IT Contracts seminars (run three times a year) in London; and he has previously lectured at the Annual On-line & Internet Commerce Law Institute seminar in Chicago and tutored at University College London.  He also runs a programme of bespoke training schemes on commercial law, IP law, IT law, AI law and data law as well as soft skills programmes such as negotiation skills and presentation skills.

Finally, you may have seen that Mark likes blogging and writing books, which are available at all good bookshops! He also appears regularly on BBC1 (usually providing advice on-screen to BBC Watchdog) and also on Sky News as a legal commentator, as well as trying to avoid the huge quantity of pink powder the TV make-up girls want to apply to his increasingly receding hairline.