Verity is the lead for Digital Leadership & Skills at the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government. She is currently leading multiple projects and work streams across skills, data and intelligent automation with key focuses on; Digital Maturity, Data Maturity, learning pathways, competency frameworks, operating models and cost value propositions.

Verity is passionate about exploring and implementing innovative solutions, to support public sector organisations, meet key government priorities and ministerial objectives at local, regional, and national levels. She values diversity and promotes equality through inclusive services and design and is skilled in creating a vision through strategical direction and collaboration, to help clients reach their goals and maximise outputs.

James McGachie is a litigator and regulatory lawyer, with over 15 years’ experience in advising clients in all sectors in strategy and compliance in relation to data privacy/information security; public and regulatory law (with a particular focus on statutory regulation, investigations, inquiries and contentious procurement), and commercial and class action disputes.

He has particular interests in cyber resilience and response and is currently advising a number of multinational clients in mitigating the risks of cyber attacks, including ransomware, drawing on his experience in assisting clients recover and respond following a wide range of cyber and data incidents.

James is a regular commentator on data privacy issues in many reputable publications, including Financier Worldwide, Lexis Nexis and The Scotsman. He regularly presents on the key risk and pressure points in relation to data privacy to organisations such as the Security Awareness Special Interest Group, the Information and Records Management Society, and the Law Society of Scotland. James also regularly provides updates to clients on data privacy through the firm's "What In-House Lawyers Need" (WIN) initiative.

Linzi Penman heads up DLA Piper's Technology sector group in the UK.

Linzi is a technology, data and AI lawyer who advises international private and public companies on matters relating to IT, commercial and compliance issues, with a particular focus on the Financial Services, Consumer Goods, Retail, Media and Entertainment sectors.

Linzi has assisted in several significant outsourcing and complex technology transactions; this work has involved business critical projects some of which have been valued in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Having gained considerable experience across a variety of matters, Linzi has invaluable insight and understanding of her clients’ needs and uses Design Thinking and Lean Six Sigma processes to find the right solution for each transaction.

Supporting the implementation phase across several global data protection compliance projects for some of the firm’s key clients, Linzi also has experience of producing pragmatic documents to ensure mature compliance with the data protection requirements. She has also negotiated complex data protection terms with some of the largest Silicon Valley tech vendors to ensure pragmatic compliance with the global myriad of data protection rules in line with her client's risk profile. Linzi has spent time seconded to DLA Piper's offices in Madrid and Washington D.C, and collaborates internationally with data protection colleagues in London, Amsterdam, Poland, Romania and Germany to provide consistent and pragmatic input on topical matters including AdTech, App User journey reviews (including cookie compliance, marketing consents and privacy notices) and data transfers. She was instrumental in launching Privacy Scorebox 2.0 - a global tool to assess and benchmark an organisation's level of data protection maturity: https://www.dlapiperdataprotection.com/scorebox/.

In 2021, Linzi was seconded to a global investment firm and assisted them with negotiations relating to several business critical SaaS solutions, including an investment data management platform to deliver a consolidated source of real-time investment data, as part of its drive towards a simplified cloud infrastructure. This work extending into assisting the firm to revamp its regulatory checklist in light of Brexit and ESMA Outsourcing to the Cloud guidelines.

Mark is the Chief Architect for the Civil Division of Leidos UK.

Working across the Central Government, Devolved Government, Transport and Air Traffic Control sectors, Mark brings a wealth of experience to his customers. Mark is a seasoned professional known for introducing groundbreaking solutions to the market. His achievements include spearheading innovative projects such as Biometric services for Borders, Machine Learning applications, and Digital Twin technology for Intelligent Road Management.

Mark has also led initiatives in Robotic Process Automation for Passport Control and has contributed to Security Accredited Shared Services, significantly reducing ownership costs for Government Departments.