A CTO Roundtable

Chris started his career in Financial Services holding senior IT positions at NPI Asset Management, Schroders, Henderson Investors and Cogent Investment Operations. He joined Law Firm Ashurst as CIO in 2002. Since leaving in 2009 he has undertaken a number of roles including Interim IT Director of International law firm Kennedys and CIO of Cloud e mail management company Mimecast.

Chris is the former Global CIO of international law firm Clyde&Co where he managed an IT team of 150 staff across 45 offices globally and also lead the Business Acceptance Unit and Litigation Support. He advised a number of businesses on IT strategy and how to deliver value from technology.

Charlotte is currently the Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, with accountability for Technology delivery across the firm, as well as driving the digital agenda and innovation through the use of Technology. With over 20 years’ experience, she has been focused on Digital Transformation and delivering complex Technology enabled Business Change for much of her career.

She has held various Technology leadership roles within FTSE 100 companies including, most recently, at Pearson, where she was CTO Core Business, then SVP of Technology and Operations Strategy & Portfolio. She has also worked at Deloitte, Linklaters, and Thomson Reuters during her career.

Bruna Pellicci is the former Global IT Director at Ashurst. She has 30 years’ experience of working in IT across sectors including law and pathology. She has spent much of her time leading and transforming the IT capability of major organisations.

Bruna specialises in building and implementing transformational global IT strategies and working as part of a leadership team to drive forward international business plans.

Karen is CTO at international law firm Bird & Bird providing strategic planning, delivery and support of IT solutions, information security and telecommunications to 30 offices in Europe, Middle East, US, Asia and Australia.

Karen has overseen the rapid expansion of Bird & Bird and has built the international team and solutions to support this.  She has led the Firm through a number of technology and business projects and is a regular and active contributor to articles and conferences particularly in legal IT, legaltech and emerging technologies.

She is involved in a number of advisory boards including ILTA and a keen supporter of diversity in technology and part of the DELTAs driving forward diversity in IT and related topics.

Sudeep Venkatesh is a noted expert on data protection, bringing two decades of industry and technology experience in this area. His expertise spans the protection of data in both structured and unstructured data ecosystems, with an emphasis on solving real-world business problems through encryption, authentication and key management. He has an in-depth understanding of regulatory compliance standards, including the EU GDPR, PCI and NYDFS, etc. Sudeep has worked on numerous data security projects with Fortune 500 firms in the US, the UK and globally.

At Egress, Sudeep works as Chief Product Officer with responsibility for product strategy, product management and the delivery of pre and post-sales technical services to customers. Prior to this, he was the Global Head of Pre-sales for the Data Security division of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), leading a global team of Sales Engineers. Sudeep joined HPE through its acquisition of Voltage Security, where he was part of the executive team.