In today’s fast-paced business environment, businesses must keep up with customer demands. This means investing launching new products or expanding to new markets. At the same time, business growth also means new legislation, new permits to request and new terms to draft. Therefore, the legal department has to deal with challenges that come along with expansion, without being a roadblock to getting things done.
Corporate governance software – what is it?
Corporate governance is at the heart of many business activities and is essential to ensuring regulatory compliance. Companies need a secure place for embedding all legal information connected with intelligence, workflows and best practices, all while staying in control and enabling business growth. Corporate governance software helps them do just that. Companies are able to centralise all legal documents and information and map all relevant legal connections or relationships.
Corporate governance challenges when entering new markets
During (international) expansion, the legal department is expected to advise on a number of issues including the costs of expansion, legal risk, the implications in terms of compliance and how it affects the company’s structure. Making matters more complicated is that the legal department must do so using limited resources.
However, problems arise when the legal department tries to reinvent the wheel. When the legal department has to start everything over from scratch not only does it become difficult to find the time to manage everything, but the resources as well.
Consider the following example from a customer in the agricultural industry. In recent years they have experienced enormous growth, which has brought on a lot of legislation to consider and a heavier administrative workload. Prior to leveraging corporate governance software, the legal department managed their corporate housekeeping and contracts with generic tools and shared drives. As a result, a contract went unnoticed and the business was locked in with a vendor for another three years, costing several thousand a year. Furthermore, the rapid growth has made it difficult for the organisation to keep up with their appointments and mandates. How could they keep up with the speed of the business growth without creating the same documents and processes over and over again?
The role of corporate governance solutions in international expansion
Corporate governance software enables legal departments expanding to new markets to:
- Have standardised processes in place for data collection and reporting
- Reduce spend on outside counsel
- Time saved on performing administrative and operational tasks and document management
- Keep up with changes to the company's structure as your organisation expands, helping to foster a can-do culture
If you consider that every entity may have at least a hundred data points, then an organisation may have tens, or even hundreds of thousands of documents. Having a cloud-based tool can help legal departments to handle expansion with confidence and be a key driver for business growth. For more information, read our article on tips to improve corporate record-keeping.
Leveraging corporate governance solutions will enable you and your team to handle business growth with ease and while maintaining control. You no longer have to worry about missing a document and being unable to locate it. For more tips on leveraging corporate governance software, check out our article on best practices for corporate housekeeping.
