Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

The “shift to the cloud” continues, with analysts making bold predictions regarding the increase of cloud adoption by companies across almost every industry. Cloud solutions offer many cost, innovation, and scalability opportunities. What is often forgotten or considered late in the process, however, is the change in the risk, compliance, and contracting paradigm that arises with the reliance on a third-party cloud provider. If given the time and attention, these changes can be managed and the risks controlled with appropriate diligence and contracting structures.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced unprecedented challenges, requiring companies to adapt quickly to the way their personnel work, changes in their business offerings, and how they interact with their customers and suppliers. With some time to adjust to the “new normal” of the pandemic (and hopefully soon, the post-pandemic), many companies are looking ahead—with a potential economic downturn being top of mind.

The race to improve, automate, and modernize business operations has led many companies to reexamine their foundational digital platforms to assess whether it is time (or past time) to transform these platforms to better support and keep pace with current and future business needs and leverage state-of-the-art technologies. While the possibilities of platform transformations are exciting—from disruptive functionality and analytics to enhanced user experience—they can also be daunting from a project management, timeline, and cost perspective.

As we discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, many SaaS providers are seizing opportunities to expand their offerings and become a go-to marketplace or network, but their original contract terms and procedures often don’t fit their evolving business models.

As more and more SaaS providers, in digital health, fintech, and other industries, look for ways to integrate with and offer third-party applications (in their quest for powerful network effects), they eventually reach a point where the reality contemplated by their original standard terms and the world (or metaverse) of their now-envisioned business model diverge.

Rights holders are almost always looking for ways to monetize the intellectual property (IP) that they own or license. For owners of rights in popular logos; characters from TV shows, movies, or video games; or similar IP, one way to generate a revenue stream is to enter into merchandise license agreements.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have exploded in popularity over the past year. Use cases for NFTs have been growing as more industries are realizing the benefits they present. A report by blockchain specialist Chainalysis found that almost $41 billion was spent on NFTs in 2021—a number that is likely to continue growing.

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Companies are transforming legacy systems, implementing automation and artificial intelligence tools, embedding digital capabilities into their products, shifting to cloud solutions and leveraging technology to better connect to their customers, personnel, and third parties, all at an unprecedented pace. The focus on businesses to get to market faster, reach a broader audience and provide real-time interaction has in turn put pressure on legal and sourcing documents to keep up. The complexity and volume of the numbers of projects (and contracts) can be daunting — especially for companies that have not yet elevated the importance of the technology law function within their organizations.

During the last year, we have seen a significant shift to “as a service” models and cloud solutions, as well as heightened attention on outsourcing as a strategic business tool to enable scalability, improved service, and accelerated access to in-demand technology and resources. This increased reliance on vendor performance to enable business operations has underscored the importance of implementing a solid service level methodology in order to: establish performance metrics that align with the customer’s expectations and business requirements; measure, monitor, and report performance against the metrics; set out the remedies for service level defaults, including service level credits and termination rights; and agree to events that may excuse performance resulting in missed service levels.