Nick Abrahams

Nick Abrahams is a corporate technology lawyer based in Sydney. Nick is our Global Head of Technology and Innovation. Nick won the 2020 Financial Times Asia Pacific Legal Innovator of the Year Award.

Nick regularly advises on tech M&A, IT procurement and data privacy/cyber-security matters. He also assists in-house counsel teams with innovation projects. Nick has deep commercial/innovation expertise and global networks in the technology space. He uses this knowledge to add value to client projects beyond the merely legal.

He is heavily involved in the technology sector as a lawyer, advisor, non-executive director, entrepreneur and investor. He has worked on over AU$3bn of TMT-related transactions globally since 2012. His group has won the Australian Technology Law Firm of the Year Award. Nick co-created the world’s first AI-enabled privacy chatbot (built on IBM Watson) and co-founded Australia’s leading online legal service, LawPath.

His experience in the technology & innovation field was gained from hands-on industry experience with major law firms in Australia and Tokyo and with organisations such as the ASX-listed Spike Networks Limited in Los Angeles where he was a Chief Operating Officer in the group and with Warner Brothers also in Los Angeles.

He is on the boards of: the Vodafone Foundation; the Sydney Film Festival; and, global leader in genomics, the Garvan Foundation. He was a director of ASX300 software company, Integrated Research 2014 to 2020.

Nick was a director of the Institute for Economics and Peace (2013-2018). The Institute is ranked in the top 15 Most Impactful Think Tanks in the world (with revenues < AU$5M). He is past President of the Australian Communications and Media Law Association. He was the only private practice lawyer on the Federal Government’s Consultative Working Group on Cyber Safety (2011-2018). He was appointed by the NSW Finance Minister to the Government’s Procurement Advisory Board (2014-2017) and was on the Committee for Sydney’s Financial Services Knowledge Hub (2015-2017). He was a Governor of the American Chamber of Commerce (2012-2018).

For many years he has been named as a “Recommended Lawyer” in the Technology, Media and Telecommunications category in PLC Which Lawyer publication, has been named as a “Leading TMT Lawyer” in Asia Pacific Legal 500 and as one of Australia’s best lawyers in Best Lawyers publication. Nick writes regularly on technology and future trends for The Australian Financial Review. He is the author of the Kindle Best Selling books Digital Disruption in Australia and Big Data, Big Responsibilities: A guide to privacy and data security for Australian business.

You can hear Nick’s views on technology trends and the future on the Smart Dust podcast.