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Each week, the Law.com Barometer newsletter, powered by the ALM Global Newsroom and Legalweek(year) 2021, brings you the trends, disruptions and shifts our reporters and editors are tracking through coverage spanning every beat and region across the ALM Global Newsroom. The micro-topic coverage will not only help you navigate the changing legal landscape, but also prepare you to discuss these shifts with thousands of legal leaders at the new year-long virtual series Legalweek(year). Click here to learn more and register for the most important virtual legal event of the year!
The Shift: The SolarWinds of Change are Blowing in the Need for Tech Collaboration
As in-house teams are increasingly expected to function more like a business unit, they are pushed to collaborate with other departments in the process, especially when it comes to technology platforms.
And according to experts, now is the time to do it. Businesses are in a time of persistent and constant disruption and general counsel are tasked with leading them through it. General counsel have a valuable role to play in enabling organizational resilience. However, for it to be effective, the legal department needs tools to help align and integrate itself with the business.
Those tools include implementing the correct technology, process, and change management. This is a huge value opportunity for legal department leaders to initiate and lead these digital transformation projects. Legal processes implemented through business enterprise systems results in effective collaboration and shifts the thinking from solely departmental to business-wide.
That emphasis on collaboration is the key to success is the legal department coordinating with other departments inside their enterprise. And the recent hack of SolarWinds Orion platform, which impacted a group of Fortune 500 companies and government entities, may get company leaders’ attention and accelerate this need. The Conversation
During a panel at Legalweek(year) 2021, a panel emphasized just how much planning and analysis in-house teams have to put into change management.
Connie Brenton, vice president, law, technology and operations at NetApp said that “[SolarWinds] has touched every single one of us. And because of that and because of the complexity and because of all of the changing regulations, we are now starting to collaborate across our organization much more frequently and we are starting to request cybersecurity assessments from our law firms.”
To help achieve that level of interconnectivity organization-wide, Brenton suggested that legal departments adopt tools, such as workflow solutions, that can be used across multiple departments. However, that spirit of collaboration also has to extend to how companies are tackling such complex issues as privacy and cybersecurity.
Mark Yacano, director of the transform advisory services at Major, Lindsey & Africa, pointed to a blurring line between legal tech and enterprise-level solutions. “We’re seeing a lot less provincial viewpoints because the legal department is recognizing that the technology they pick impacts the business. … [T]he trend that I would say is definitely shifting towards the best investment from a legal tech perspective to encourage it to be an enterprise-wide system.”
The Significance
In short, disruption is here to stay. Along with ongoing COVID-19 challenges, now cybersecurity and data privacy are back on the list of GC’s top concerns and law firms need to understand that renewed focus.
In fact, in the Association of Corporate Counsel’s new global survey of chief legal officers, in-house leaders ranked cybersecurity as the most important issue for their overall business for the first time in the survey’s 22-year history.
“I think it’s because of the convergence of all the fairly new laws and regulations and companies are having to find their way through it,” according to ACC president and CEO Veta Richardson. “There’s significant liability if you get it wrong, liability concerns and risks that are even bigger than liability under the statutes or laws.”
Highly visible cyber incidents such as the SolarWinds’ Orion platform also keep data privacy threats at the forefront. Incidents like the one at SolarWinds, which saw the company’s Orion platform hacked on a scale that jeopardized the security of government agencies and Fortune 500 companies alike, cast a broad shadow.
The Information
Want to know more? Here's what we've discovered in the ALM Global Newsroom: Legal or Enterprise Tech? MLA Advisers Discuss the Blurring Line Inside Corporate Legal Six Shifts General Counsel Must Make to Legal Department Operations by 2025 Sterling Miller: From In-House to Outside Counsel, More Than 10 Things You Need to Know What In-House Counsel Can Learn from Criminal Prosecution of Uber’s Former Chief Security Officer 5 Data Privacy and Security Must-Dos for GCs in 2021 Corporate Legal Department Expansion Persists Amid Pandemic, Various CrisesFor more information on the Legalweek(year) virtual experience, visit legalweekshow.com or follow @Legalweekshow and engage with #Legalweek21 and #Legalweekyear for updates. The Forecast
Organizational resilience and ability to adapt to business disruption to deliver on its objectives, has become a clear value distinguisher for the legal department. After the 2008 crisis, the legal department’s role was to provide cost-efficient legal advice to the business. Now that navigating a diverse array of disruptions has become a norm in decision-making, the role will continue to shift to guiding business partners through disruption to empower them to take appropriate risks and pivot in response to changing conditions.
Heather D. Nevitt is the Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Counsel, Inside Counsel and Global Leaders in Law. Email her at hnevit@alm.com and find her on Twitter @HeatherDNevitt
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