Are you ready to deal with the consequences of Brexit-related legislation changes from a compliance perspective?
Changes to legislation governing matters related to employment, product design, trade and more, will require in-house lawyers to review their current processes and evaluate new regulatory information to mitigate compliance risk post-Brexit. If you’re unable to generate an accurate overview of your compliance processes and documents, how can you ensure you will be able to act quick enough to minimise your risk exposure?
Luckily, with the right technology, you can store all your compliance information in a single system, enabling you to quickly generate insights on the risks and opportunities in front of you. Centralising all of your compliance requirements, policies and deadlines in a smart repository can help you track, share and report on compliance risks, empowering you to develop strategic action plans and involve key stakeholders in establishing new governance.
Here, we will review how to a smart repository for your legal information can help you prepare for Brexit by providing you with the right tools to manage compliance and mitigate legal risk.
Managing your compliance risks
As an in-house lawyer, you need to have a clear overview of your regulatory compliance requirements, policies and deadlines. With so many pending regulatory changes to consider with Brexit, you need a system that will help you 1) register and track current compliance processes and 2) process, analyse and store new regulatory information, making it available to you when you need to take strategic business decisions.
For example, faced with the reality of a hard Brexit, many businesses may evaluate the impact of the market and consider a business transfer to a UK or EU jurisdiction. However, taking this decision does not come without a close consideration of all the regulatory aspects and legal risks involved.
When evaluating a business transfer in a different jurisdiction, in-house lawyers need to take a close look at how both post-Brexit UK laws and the new jurisdiction’s local laws affect a wide variety of compliance matters including data privacy, IP and trademark registrations, supply contracts and more. For example, maintaining their business in a UK jurisdiction will mean businesses will have to create new processes to comply with new regulations (like those that will define the new trading relationship with the EU as a “third country”).
On the other hand, transferring their business to an EU jurisdiction will require businesses to analyse the regulatory aspects of the new jurisdiction and determine if they are compliant with local legislation (like employment law for the relocation of staff across borders, or local data privacy regulations).
Such evaluations can be a nightmare if compliance information is scattered across various hard drives or shared files. In-house lawyers who use a centralized tool to track current compliance processes and analyse new regulatory information are in a better position to monitor the potential impact of legislative changes and take proactive steps to mitigate compliance risk.
All your legal information at a glance
In addition to reviewing your compliance policies and processes, post-Brexit legal and regulatory changes may also require you to gather up-to-date information on your corporate structure or contract risks. When changes come, will you be able to provide data-driven insights to support your CEO, CFO and Board in taking strategic decisions? Will you be able to answer to their questions?
In-house lawyers need to ensure that all of their legal information is organised so they can generate insights to inform decisions. With a structured system for storing, tracking, sharing and reporting on legal information, in-house lawyers are able to develop strategic action plans and involve key stakeholders in establishing new governance.
Download our “Preparing for Brexit” whitepaper for more on how in-house lawyers will need to answer urgent questions on how to approach Brexit.
