Managing legal compliance and regulation efforts – mandated through legislation or otherwise – are essential for preserving a company’s opportunities for growth and minimizing risks of a financial penalty or reputational harm. This burden falls on the general counsel and in-house attorneys in most companies.
While good rationale exists for attorneys to be responsible for legal compliance and regulation, not all legal departments have the resources to administer it. See how outsourcing compliance obligations can improve your department’s legal operations and learn more about Exigent’s five core compliance services.
Key Takeaways
- Managing compliance obligations can be a source of friction for understaffed legal departments because it can involve a lot of high-volume, low value-add tasks.
- ALSPs offer an effective solution to compliance needs through talent and technology resources for addressing complex and routine compliance needs alike.
- Compliance and regulatory support needs often arise for companies during significant growth, such as entering new markets, geographic territories, and other M&A activity.
Compliance: A Top Priority for Legal Departments But a Thankless Job
The idea of friction between corporate legal departments and compliance can sound counterintuitive, but it exists for a few key reasons. First, we all know the value of compliance in mitigating risk, maintaining operational instability, and avoiding reputational harm or irrelevance. Despite that unlimited value, this work is a thankless job for legal departments because it’s a no-news-is-good-news task.
Second, compliance involves a lot of low-value-add, repetitive, and time-consuming legal workflows (i.e., paper pushing). It creates conflict for short-staffed legal departments with resources already stretched razor-thin. General counsels must weigh the risk/reward of completing high-level attorney work (e.g., legal business strategy and deal negotiations) with compliance matters. Repeatedly choosing the former over the latter can quickly snowball minor compliance requirements into costly mistakes.
The Compliance Solution for Resource-Stretched Legal Departments
Legal departments that lack the requisite knowledge base or FTEs to successfully meet regulatory and compliance obligations may find value in partnering with an alternative legal service provider (ALSP) like Exigent. Doing so provides an opportunity to get an objective analysis of the current state of your compliance process lifecycles, among other benefits.
You can benefit from diligent completion of compliance projects at a fraction of the cost – without sacrificing quality. Exigent unites state-of-the-art legal technology with its diverse group of legal talent that extends beyond traditional attorney and paralegal roles. Our team also has legal operation specialists, contract managers, data analysts, and others, allowing us to customize the most efficient solution for your compliance needs.
Our 5 Spheres of Legal Compliance and Regulation Management Services
Exigent can help you with:
1. Regulatory Compliance Support
Regulatory compliance is an issue that lurks behind every decision a company makes. We live in a statutory state as government agencies pass laws and rules with increasing complexity and overlap. It’s more than a full-time job to process and act on everything.
In our experience, regulatory issues often occur during growth periods for companies entering new markets, expanding product offerings, or contemplating M&A activity. Such expansion can easily overwhelm the most efficient legal departments. During such times, we create a new regulatory compliance model, giving GCs and executives confidence that we have checked their blind spots. Some of the ways we provide regulatory support include:
- Host workshops for the legal team and business stakeholders to gather insight
- Research applicable regulatory and legislative mandates
- Develop risk analysis dashboards to prioritize regulatory compliance objectives
- Update contract playbooks and clause banks
- Track and automate obligations (e.g., upcoming deadlines, looming expirations, and renewal periods)
2. Corporate Secretarial
Corporate governance is a standard function of legal departments that involves both high-level attorney work (e.g., strategy on corporate structure) as well as low-skill, high-volume work like:
- Name registrations
- Transaction filings
- Maintaining minute books
- Drafting resolutions and consents
- Annual report filings
Some of these tasks require the expertise of your GCs, but legal departments can save money by outsourcing them to third parties (as opposed to hiring FTEs to do the job). Taking this work outside the company becomes preferable when you have corporate governance obligations all over the globe through subsidiaries or other instances of nexus.
3. Data & Information Privacy
Doing business in today’s climate means navigating the maze of rules and liabilities surrounding data collection, storing, and sharing. These concerns include protecting the information of customers, employees, trade secrets, and other intellectual property vital to a company’s success. We give GCs and legal departments an honest review of their current policies and protocols in data privacy management. Our next step is to develop a framework that reduces potential exposure through efforts like privacy-by-design principles and data subject access requests (DSARs).
4. Contract Management
While contracts are about the business relationships between two or more parties, their interpretation and enforceability are always at the mercy of current law, regulatory requirements, and other industry standards. This is especially true for contracts involving specialized fields (e.g., energy, health, construction) and diverse localities. Our contract management services give companies and global enterprises the confidence to move the business forward and the accompanying risks in the following ways:
- Develop clause banks and deviation matrices (so you can create standards and know where differences or inconsistencies exist in your forms)
- Check for legislative and regulatory compliance
- Obligations management (e.g., notices, filings, expirations, renewals)
Aside from internal controls, our contract management support is helpful in one-off situations like due diligence in a merger or acquisition that necessitates the review of thousands of contracts. We can staff the contract review project to meet budgetary needs or short deadlines.
Our proprietary AI tool also allows us to extract critical data from documents. The benefit is twofold. We know which contracts to prioritize in the review process, and we can quickly identify items for escalation to your legal department’s attorneys.
5. Immigration Compliance
Hiring international employees provides businesses with innumerable benefits like broader cultural perspectives and language fluencies. However, this also brings burdens of compliance forms and increased scrutiny from government agencies. Our immigration compliance services include audits to identify gaps in your SOPs, I-9 form compliance, E-Verify process assistance, wage-related issues, and M&A due diligence.
Use Exigent’s Proven Strategy on Your Next Compliance Project
Exigent’s mission through its legal compliance and regulatory services is to build solutions for clients that improve both business and legal outcomes. We take great care in managing all phases of the compliance lifecycle for legal departments, from assessing current SOPs, remediating any areas of exposure, and implementing programs for future enforcement. Our diligence and efficiency in administering legal compliance are why businesses turn to Exigent. Meet with our representatives for more information on how we can service your next compliance audit or project.
Also, download our free whitepaper on contract management for more legal compliance ideas.
