Simon Jay

Simon is the head of our Corporate team in Melbourne and his experience as a commercial lawyer spans over 35 years.

His practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and corporate transactions in the mid-market with particular emphasis on the technology sector.

In the technology sector, Simon has extensive experience in:

• tender agreements for the provision of IT services to both the government and the private sectors;
• agreements for the development and deployment of software;
• software support and maintenance agreements;
• IT development and integration agreements;
• IT vendor access agreements;
• e-platform agreements; and
• software escrow agreements and software licensing agreements.

Simon’s recent experience includes:

• Selling the founder’s units in a privately held unit trust that carried on a SAS enterprise for a base line sale price of $23M. The M&A deal involved complex earnout and true up adjustments that are atypical in the M&A space;
• Acting for a private company in raising $70M in a land development company;
• Facilitating the demerger of a corporate group with entities in Australia, Ireland, United Kingdom and the USA that provides IT solutions to the building and construction industry globally;
• Acting for the US party in a demerger of an Australian company that operates in the textiles industry with annual turnover in FY 24 of $19M;
• Acquiring all the shares in a company that held a utilisable digital currency exchange provider registration with Austrac. The focus of the legal due diligence was on both the status of the company’s DCE and proof that it had never traded;
• Acting for an IT company in the health sector and negotiating complex IT design, build and maintenance contracts for its clients the Commonwealth, State and Territory governments of Australia. The IT application potentially benefits all Australians by controlling peoples access to drugs of addiction;
• Documenting from end to end a wholesale real estate investment trust in conjunction with a joint venture partner to acquire commercially zoned land in the Western suburbs of Melbourne and to then design, build and construct warehouses for sale to third parties;
• Acting for a minority shareholder and extracting it and its board representative from a group of companies. The focus was on obtaining comprehensive releases and discharges for the benefit of our client from a wide range of contracts and other potentially binding arrangements of which posed material risks to our clients; and
• Obtaining a wholesale AFSL for a client that wished to operate a compliant contributory mortgage scheme.

• Finalist – Commercial Team of the Year, Lawyers Weekly Australian Law Awards 2023