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“The pandemic has flattened staffing budgets and increased legal workloads; technology is the most obvious solution for many legal departments.”

Any business that hires employees or works with contractors and business partners will inevitably need to exchange proprietary information in order to carry out business.  Non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, can help ensure this information is protected and not used against you. Regardless of the type of NDA used, effective ones should do the following:

According to McKinsey’s insights on Automotive & Assembly, car insurers are likely to shift the core of their business model, focusing mainly on insuring car manufacturers from liabilities from a technical failure of their automotive vehicles, as opposed to protecting private customers from risks associated with human error in accidents. [1]

For a legal department trying to find out where it’s going wrong with budgets or litigation outcomes, legal analytics is a viable solution. The legal business can no longer survive on the basis of guesswork. Much like any other business, legal departments are now expected to operate and report conclusions derived from analytics. This is a blessing in disguise because one of the best ways to improve operational efficiency is to extract actionable insights from veracious data.

In the wake of the data scandals like Facebook-Cambridge Analytica, the California State Legislature on June 28, 2018, passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), which is by far the most sweeping consumer privacy law in the United States. The CCPA will take effect on January 1, 2020 and is aimed at enhancing privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California.[1]

Finding the silver lining in upcoming regulations

Financial organizations have become quite tired of the unceasing flurry of regulatory activity in their industry. But what many of them don’t realize is that when regulatory mandates are seen as an opportunity rather than a burden, the long-term benefits surpass the short-term discomfort. Colin Reid, CTO at Vox Financial Partners[1], points out how European banks took advantage of the new legislative framework, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), to standardize trade records across the EU by upgrading trade data warehouses to centralized data repositories. Now, they are well-equipped to respond to future regulatory changes and trade reporting requirements. Reid proposes three ways to use upcoming regulatory changes to upgrade one’s contract management approach[1]:

“Doing more with less” is the new legal mantra, particularly in litigation services. This mantra can be trickiest to implement in eDiscovery. Document reviews can end up becoming lengthy, expensive, and convoluted if you are not well-prepared. Special Counsel recently came up with ten steps for achieving a workflow that will prepare you for your next eDiscovery project[1].

Nearly three years ago, the International Accounting Standards Board published a new standard for lease transactions – the IFRS 16 – with the objective to “report information that faithfully represents leases transactions and provides a basis for users of financial statements to assess the amount, timing and uncertainty of cash flows arising from leases”. This regulation details the identification, measurement, demonstration, and full disclosure of most leases on the balance sheet to facilitate transparency of reporting[1].

Any company, no matter its size, popularity or purpose, may be a target for cybercrime, making it essential to be prepared and vigilant.

Legal forecasters expect litigation caseloads to grow throughout 2023, with some estimating that companies will face ‘more litigation than ever’ this year and that litigation matters will be more complex and riskier than in the past.