Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

The conditions created by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and resulting government shutdown orders have raised questions across various industries regarding contractual rights and obligations during the crisis.

Please join us as we examine highlights from the Contract Corner feature on our Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis blog. The series reviews essential issues and practical pointers for technology, outsourcing, and commercial agreements.

We hope to see you for our annual series—now in its 10th year—of tailored webinars focused on current technology issues, trends, and developments that are of key importance to our friends and clients.

New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) issued guidance on April 13 alerting regulated entities of the significant increase in cybercrime during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

There comes a time when every contract will come to an end; however, what happens when the parties don’t want that to happen but there are no provisions in the contract dealing with extension rights? In this blog we analyze good practices in relation to extending contracts where there is no express right of extension.

Please join us for a discussion of how the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic will affect existing and future outsourcing contracts and relationships.

Often included in long-term outsourcing/managed services agreements but sometimes overlooked as a contractual right, in this post we look at benchmarking provisions, including what benchmarking is, common rights and restrictions, and other considerations for customers and suppliers.

When responding to requests for proposals (RFPs), vendors should be conscious that they might be disclosing highly confidential or commercially sensitive material to the potential customer, with no guarantee of securing the proposed contract. Such information could, without any restrictions, be used by the potential customer to assist the vendor’s competitors or to develop solutions in-house.

Morgan Lewis’s COVID-19 Task Force and Coronavirus COVID-19 resource page have been established to address the variety of legal issues impacting companies at this time.

There are two primary models by which vendors will make software available to customers (1) software as a service (SaaS); and (2) on premise. In a SaaS model, the vendor provides, maintains, and hosts (either itself or through a hosting SaaS vendor) the desired software, and grants the customer access to the software functionality via the internet.