Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

Signing up for a streaming service might be faster than choosing what to watch, with only a few taps unlocking a month of movies, a season of sports, or enough airline Wi-Fi to make a long flight feel shorter. That convenience, however, rests on a recurring contract that may continue after the vacation ends, change price while it remains in effect, and provide less control over content than the word “subscription” suggests.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) agreement renewals are often viewed as routine procurement exercises focused primarily on pricing and continued access to services. In practice, however, renewals present an important opportunity for customers to reassess legal, operational, and compliance risks that may have evolved since the agreement was originally negotiated.

ISG’s latest index highlights a technology services and software market that is increasingly defined by cloud momentum and AI-driven investment shifts. While headline growth remains strong, the underlying dynamics point to a more selective and strategic buying environment as enterprises head into 2026.

The European Parliament recently published a report (the Report) on the interplay between several key EU digital regulations to assess overlap and gaps and highlight the regulatory complexity that these different regimes have collectively imposed on businesses.

On October 3, 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 940 into law, with the announcement of new funding in an effort to establish a unified strategy in the state to help continue growing the quantum technology industry. AB 940 seeks to build on the state’s established presence in the sector: California is home to both National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy quantum federal research centers. Faster-than-expected innovation could see a surge in the quantum technology economy not just in California but the global economy overall.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) recently published a consultation paper (Consultation) that proposes to expand third-party risk management requirements for certain EU-regulated financial entities. The Consultation would extend the EBA’s current guidelines around outsourcing arrangements (EBA Guidelines) to all third-party services arrangements, excluding those services that are within scope of the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), and would add further requirements to the existing guidelines, aligning with those requirements introduced under DORA.

UK financial regulators recently published their supervisory expectations for critical third party service providers (CTPs) to the financial sector under the United Kingdom’s new regime extending regulatory oversight to CTPs. The final rules align with key themes of other regulatory regimes seeking to reinforce operational resilience (e.g., the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)) around risk management, supply chain management, and incident management, among other areas.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) on October 31, 2024 published observations and key lessons from how firms responded to the CrowdStrike IT outage. The outage caused disruption across several industries globally, and the FCA highlights for UK financial services the importance of ensuring operational resilience in order to minimize the potential impact of future events on consumers and markets.

An essential feature for customers in outsourcing software licensing and arrangements is the provision of robust protection against any software that could embed and distribute malware. To address these concerns, the inclusion of a no-virus warranty has become a common expectation on customers’ side.

As more and more purchases of digital content happen online, without delivery of any physical media to the purchaser, consumers may not be able to access their purchased content in situations where vendors have removed such content from their online libraries, platforms, or apps unilaterally as the result of the expiration or revocation of the content rights. In response to numerous consumer complaints about this occurred or threatened loss of access rights to content purchased online, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB-2426 into law on September 24, 2024. The bill will come into effect on January 1, 2025.