Earlier this month I attended Practical Law’s inaugural Legal and Technology Procurement Conference. Many of the themes highlighted in my Legal Geek 2018 post were again hot topics of debate and there were engaging sessions on legal procurement strategy, improving operational efficiency and overcoming the challenges of implementing legal tech. Here are my top ten takeaways.
I’ve been worrying about whistleblowing lately. In particular, whether the traditional methods of reporting really are effective, as the level of reporting in many organisations just seems low. I’m not sure that this is a situation where “least said is soonest mended”, as the saying goes. If there’s misconduct occurring in an organisation, the compliance team needs to know, and know fast.
Brexit planning dominates the agenda this month but in-house lawyers should also keep an eye on corporate governance reforms, new regulations introducing personal liability for directors for unlawful direct marketing, and two consultations on the future of audit.
While it’s impossible to know exactly how many people are living in modern slavery, the respected Walk Free Foundation put the global number in 2016 at 40.3 million. The systemic nature of this most serious of issues can make us feel powerless. It was really inspiring therefore to attend a couple of sessions at the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Trust Conference which took place last week in London. Continue reading
Although contracts document a consensual commercial relationship between two parties working together to achieve common or overlapping business goals, they are also enforceable legal instruments that can have potentially devastating effects on businesses due to the imposition of liability.
The legal and business personnel involved in the negotiation need to deal with this contradiction, and find a balance between achieving commercial objectives and safeguarding against legal risk. For repetitive contracts, an intelligent use of playbooks can help address some of the pain points in this process.
The Institute of Business Ethics (IBE) Ethics at Work Survey 2018 report identifies a number of key findings from the UK relating broadly to culture, behaviour, speaking up and ethics programmes. The UK findings are compared in the report with the European responses from Ethics at Work: 2018 survey of employees – Europe.
For those with a compliance or ethics role in an organisation, the findings are an interesting, and at times surprising, read and are a useful tool in the testing and benchmarking of corporate culture and ethics and compliance programmes.
The pace of publication of Brexit statutory instruments (SIs) picked up this month. The government also continued to publish technical notices giving guidance to UK businesses and citizens on how to prepare for a no-deal Brexit.
I attended Thomson Reuters’ annual Data, Privacy and Cyber-Resilience Forum last week. This year’s event marked a real contrast to the 2017 edition which was focused on getting ready for the 25 May implementation deadline for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
With us now approaching six months since the GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 came into effect, the sense was the world had moved on quickly. Recurring themes throughout the day were “maturing the model” and “privacy as the new normal”. Inevitably, Brexit reared its head too. Continue reading
Legal Geek 2018 attracted more than 2,000 people from over 40 countries and this year the event included a second stage aimed at the in-house market. It hosted some thought-provoking speakers and lively panel discussions, and one of the overarching themes was how customer behaviour is driving change and making digital transformation necessary for every organisation, whatever their industry sector. Here are my other key takeaways.
In the past weeks and months, we have seen some high profile enforcement activity by the ICO central to geopolitical events of the past, present and future.
The regulator has brought some fruition to its investigation work into data breaches connected with the 2016 EU referendum, issuing a £500,000 fine to Facebook, following on from the ICO’s enforcement action back in July in the closely connected case of AggregateIQ.