Barbara Murphy Melby

Barbara is recognized as a leading outsourcing and commercial transactions lawyer, counseling clients in structuring, negotiating, realigning, and terminating a wide range of commercial relationships. This includes IT, human resources, finance and accounting, procurement, research and development, logistics, and facilities outsourcing. She collaborates with clients on transactions for onshore, offshore, managed and co-sourced solutions.

With a diverse client base from the financial services, life sciences, hospitality, energy, health, and retail industries, Barbara assists with technology and data acquisition and implementation and service agreements. Her experience includes enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, platform transformation, licensing, software as a service (SaaS), information as a service (IaaS), ecommerce, data acquisition and services, cloud computing, and mobility agreements.

In addition to working with clients on complex outsourcing, technology and data transactions, she helps clients develop contracting and governance strategies for commercial transaction portfolios. She implements a variety of coverage models, including mixes of in-house and Morgan Lewis resources, and tailors them to meet clients’ needs. She coordinates support of commercial contracts for direct and indirect spend for the global procurement organizations of several Fortune 500 companies.

Barbara’s recent transactions include: transformational IT and business process outsourcing transactions for a major medical technology company; the renegotiation of a subservicing services for a leading financial institution; the termination of a major IT services agreement and the negotiation of multiple successor agreements; and an agreement for the implementation and ongoing management of a data analytics system. Barbara co-authored two seminal works in the outsourcing field, Information Technology Outsourcing: Process, Strategies, and Contracts, and Business Process Outsourcing: Process, Strategies, and Contracts (both John Wiley).

She also speaks on outsourcing and technology transactions at business, legal, and professional conferences. She spearheaded the launch of, and continues to lead, Morgan Lewis’s blog on technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions—Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis.