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Contract administration. Compliance updates. Discovery responses. Mental property portfolio administration. These rote, often-time-consuming duties can all be a part of an in-house counsel’s day-to-day schedule. The issue? Many can devolve into expensive time sinks for a authorized division’s salaried expertise.
Whereas generative synthetic intelligence has the potential to remove a few of this lower-level work, it’s not fairly there but. Many workplaces don’t permit using instruments reminiscent of ChatGPT due to knowledge safety considerations. Though the authorized know-how sector is arising with totally different purposes to assist normal counsels, they’re nonetheless a good distance off from changing precise human beings.
In gentle of the ever-increasing strain from the C-suite to trim prices, in-house authorized departments have gravitated towards partaking distant contract attorneys to assist shoulder a few of this vital however comparatively lower-value work. This contains particular person contract legal professionals, in addition to different authorized companies suppliers and distributors that may unfold duties throughout a bench of attorneys in a number of time zones and cost-efficient jurisdictions.
Leveraging distant contract legal professionals and distributors, nonetheless, can have drawbacks—together with elevated knowledge safety dangers. As we noticed within the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving distant staff of any kind entry to an organization’s info know-how programs solely will increase the potential of expensive knowledge breaches and extra liabilities.
Provided that the common price of coping with a safety breach in 2023 reached an all-time high of $4.45 million, in line with a report by software program firm IBM Safety, knowledge safety have to be prime of thoughts when partaking contract legal professionals.
Naturally, GCs should stability cybersecurity and work-access issues to make sure that the dangers of introducing new distant attorneys and vendor companions don’t outweigh the advantages. After they account for these elements correctly, GCs can have a fairly secure, safe blueprint for supporting and leveraging distant legal professionals to strengthen the authorized operate.
1. Handle delicate info by way of strategic delegation
A key first step when partaking contract attorneys and distributors can be the best: Mitigate threat by assigning work involving less-sensitive knowledge.
Typically, in-house departments outsource tasks to unlock inside expertise with out considering by way of the data that they share. Whereas that is comprehensible, GCs ought to know that each process that they delegate includes disclosing not less than some proprietary firm knowledge.
With that in thoughts, GCs ought to method any recent contract lawyer or vendor a lot as they might a brand new inside rent: Assign out low-risk duties till the outsourced expertise have confirmed that they’re reliable and may deal with extra duty.
In doing so, GCs should assess the sensitivity of the data concerned in early assignments and the dangers that might come up from sharing it. When beginning with new contract legal professionals and distributors, GCs ought to prioritize duties involving nonproprietary, publicly identified or lower-priority knowledge that might not current substantial legal responsibility dangers if disclosed. Assignments involving standardized contracts and nondisclosure agreements that the corporate recurrently sends to shoppers, for instance, would meet these parameters.
2. Set up safety frameworks at onboarding
As soon as onboarded, vendor contract attorneys and particular person distant attorneys may have not less than restricted entry to delicate company info, which can little question broaden over time. To set the stage, authorized departments ought to accomplice with inside IT leaders to establish and emphasize the group’s most well-liked knowledge safety priorities and use that to tell the onboarding course of. These preferences will differ from firm to firm and process to process however can embody entry controls, incident response protocols and knowledge safety and dealing with practices.
When vetting a vendor, authorized departments, both with their in-house personnel or an outdoor auditor, ought to study that potential accomplice’s firewalls, encryption, knowledge backup safeguards and different security measures to make sure that they adjust to the corporate’s necessities.
GCs ought to verify whether or not the seller’s legal professionals will work on the premises—with the seller’s gear, safety safeguards and servers—or from their private places of work with their safety setups. Partaking penetration testers who can vet a vendor’s protections and leveraging devoted vulnerability scanners can all give invaluable info on the seller’s capabilities.
They’ll additionally negotiate well-drafted clauses into their service agreements to make sure that any vendor stays compliant all through the engagement. Offshore attorneys are usually employed by way of a U.S.-based different authorized companies supplier or staffing firm, which might be sure by their respective contractual clauses.
Corporations working with particular person contract legal professionals ought to take extra of a lead in outlining their safety and entry wants given the absence of an middleman and see whether or not the lawyer can be a great match for the proposed engagement. Given the plain variations between a person lawyer’s safety capabilities and a vendor’s safety capabilities, GCs ought to alter their evaluation and safety expectations accordingly.
Tariq Hafeez is the co-founder and president of LegalEase Options. He says normal counsels should stability cybersecurity and work-access issues to make sure that the dangers of introducing new distant attorneys and vendor companions don’t outweigh the advantages.
3. Double-check ISO and different cybersecurity certifications
Any vendor or particular person distant lawyer an in-house division retains should observe commonplace practices round knowledge safety and IT infrastructure to make sure a secure, safe and collaborative working expertise. If an in-house division is contemplating a vendor, they need to be sure that it possesses industry-recognized safety certifications and abide by these requirements of their consumer work.
Whereas obligatory certifications can differ relying on the group’s key sectors and enterprise wants, in-house departments ought to pay shut consideration as to whether their potential outsourcing companions meet Worldwide Group for Standardization cybersecurity requirements. These worldwide requirements information baseline safety protocols for various {industry} requirements—together with cybersecurity and IT.
The ISO certification that in-house departments ought to examine for first is ISO 27001. This commonplace addresses the required frameworks for dealing with delicate info, addressing safety controls, and creating a strong info administration system for managing, sharing and transferring knowledge.
Nonetheless, numerous {industry} knowledge safety and integrity requirements might additionally apply relying on the corporate’s goal sectors and the work that the in-house division is outsourcing. In-house departments partaking in federal-government-commissioned tasks ought to ask distributors about their plans to adjust to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which units expectations for dealing with delicate authorities knowledge.
GCs in different sectors might ask potential distributors how they fulfill System and Group Controls 1 and System and Group Controls 2 requirements, which the American Institute of Licensed Public Accountants established for dealing with monetary reporting knowledge and privateness controls.
4. Bolstering company-side safety
IBM Safety’s Value of a Knowledge Breach Report 2023 revealed that incidents associated to distant working added greater than $173,000 on common to the imply price of a knowledge breach. Subsequently, any group experimenting with outsourcing ought to be sure that their cybersecurity infrastructure is powerful.
A giant element of profitable distant work methods? Encryption, encryption and extra encryption. This tenet shall be vital no matter whether or not an organization engages a large-scale vendor or a small group of particular person contract legal professionals.
Ideally, an organization’s distant work safeguards ought to combine multifactor authentication, digital non-public networks and even safe net gateways to handle vulnerability elements associated to a person lawyer or vendor’s web community. If attainable, they need to additionally use distant system administration programs to observe unauthorized software program updates, downloads and the like on the distant lawyer’s digital server.
Additional protections might be obligatory for distant legal professionals and distributors working with delicate knowledge. GCs ought to work with the corporate’s IT groups to determine consumer entry privileges for databases containing proprietary knowledge and use “zero belief” entry strategies that require common entry authentication.
These strategies can scale back the chance of outdoor attorneys compromising the corporate’s cybersecurity protocols whereas making certain that they’ve the account entry ranges obligatory for supporting the corporate’s efforts.
As with every outsourcing endeavor, working with distant attorneys can contain a number of challenges. With the fitting instruments, testing and delegation methods, in-house counsels can safely and securely faucet into an keen international workforce to assist their day-to-day operations run extra easily.
Tariq Hafeez is the co-founder and president of LegalEase Options. He helps unique gear producers and in-house authorized and compliance groups leverage authorized transformation to enhance and streamline how they method authorized analysis, compliance, contract administration and litigation analytics and assist.
Thoughts Your Enterprise is a collection of columns written by legal professionals, authorized professionals and others throughout the authorized {industry}. The aim of those columns is to supply sensible steering for attorneys on methods to run their practices, present details about the most recent traits in authorized know-how and the way it might help legal professionals work extra effectively, and techniques for constructing a thriving enterprise.
Considering contributing a column? Ship a question to [email protected].
This column displays the opinions of the writer and never essentially the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Affiliation.
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