Gemma James

Senior Consultant

Email:

Gemma is a senior commercial solicitor with broad experience across a variety of sectors, focusing her advice on commercial and legal risk. Gemma practices a leaner more efficient approach to drafting, resulting in unambiguous enforceable contracts.

Gemma started her career at international law firm, Bird & Bird. After qualifying as a commercial lawyer and taking time to enhance her skills in data protection Gemma joined Deloitte to set up and launch Deloitte Legal, where she successfully developed a commercial team.

Gemma’s passion for business took her in-house to the US, where she acted as Global Group Legal Counsel for LiiV, a digital anthropology focused company, with group companies in content creation and data analytics with over twenty-five thousand users across one hundred different countries.

Gemma’s most recent role, before joining Ignition, was Head of Commercial at Founders Law where she combined her experience of both private practice and being in-house to provide strategic, business focused, pragmatic advice with the view of assisting her clients in achieving their goals with fewer legal hurdles.

Fine Print

Relevant experience includes

· GCaaS: Gemma frequently operates as a fractional general counsel and has been a guest member on client senior leadership teams to help advise the board, focusing her advice on the business, ensuring legal is an “enabler”.

· Contract Advice: Gemma advises on a variety of high value contracts and policies, including complex multi-jurisdictional SaaS contracts, AI consulting contracts and bespoke agreements and policies developed with clients as they build. Gemma’s clients range from small start-ups, through to scale ups and large multi-national group companies.

· Broad Sector Application: Gemma is a true generalist and can therefore apply her experience across multiple sectors including AI, technology, fintech, cleantech, automotive and defence.

· Business Focused: Gemma is a business first lawyer and always seeks to support her clients actively developing a strategy for growth, whilst adopting an

agile stance allowing her clients to proactively pivot in the ever-changing market.

· Business continuity and disaster recovery: Gemma assisted in the response to a hacking attack on her client’s business, including notifying the ICO of a data breach; maintaining an accurate record of all events, communicating with the ICO, internal staff and customers; managing the insurance company response and onboarding of cyber security specialists; and post-incident recovery and customer claim management.

· Data Protection: Gemma has experience undertaking full data protection compliance projects for large international data heavy businesses and ensures that her advice leads to compliance without unnecessary complexity.

· Playbooks and Training: Gemma is always keen to create playbooks and client guidance documentation; Gemma has worked closely with sales and other teams to produce these documents and provide training across businesses in order to empower the business and allow for more rapid growth.

· Group Structures and Intragroup Arrangements: Having spent time at Deloitte working with tax professionals, Gemma enjoys advising on group structures and working with tax advisors to implement cost and tax efficient intragroup agreements reflecting group activities and the different pricing methods applied.

Client Testimonial

Sam Jeremiah

“Gemma and Business Focused Legal supported FernAI as our go to advisor during our startup phase. Starting a new company can be daunting, not least because when you start delivering chargeable services to customers, it’s your name, organisation and reputation that is on the line. Gemma was able to work closely with us at FernAI to understand the nature of our business, our types of customers, the geographies that we operate in and what legal documentation and contracts we’d need from day 1. She offered essential advice on IP, data protection and many other things that, if not done correctly, could be extremely costly to the business.

I love having Gemma as our legal advisor and would recommend her to any other business that wants a tailored service that is specific to their business and its customers”.

Education

Women in Leadership Development Programme – University of Oxford

LLB and LPC – Kaplan aw School

Graduate Diploma in Law – University of Law

BSc Natural Sciences

More about Gemma

joined Ignition 2026

My favourite place: Gibbs Beach in Barbados, I love it because it is so peaceful and it hasn’t really changed since I used to go there as a child.

My favourite book: “And Miles to go Before I Sleep: A British Vet in Africa by Hugh Cran” I loved reading about all his adventures, I think with my love of Africa I really understood some of the challenges he was up against and why he persevered with his trip.

Alternative career: Probably a vet or something to do with being outside in the wild.

Interests: I am a real get up and go person, so I like to get out and about with my family as much as possible and have the odd glass of wine along the way. We have recently moved back to South Africa, so we are currently enjoying introducing the children and animals to a whole new life compared to Herefordshire.