Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

Emily Lowe and Ben Klaber recently presented a webinar on key contracting considerations in life sciences supply chain and manufacturing transactions as part of Morgan Lewis’ ongoing Digital Disruption and Innovation webinar series.

As 2021 comes to a close, we have once again compiled all the links to our Contract Corner blog posts, a regular feature of Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis. In these posts, members of our global technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions practice highlight particular contract provisions, review the issues, and propose negotiating and drafting tips.

With the exponential growth of cyber threats, cloud computing and remote working, contract provisions regarding data security requirements have also expanded in size and frequency. It has become common practice to prepare schedules to detail (and limit) security requirements. Customers and vendors both have a vested interest in clearly identifying expectations and obligations for such requirements. In this week’s Contract Corner, we explore considerations when it comes to drafting security schedules.

As the availability and variety of digital health tools continue to increase, evidence is also being presented that those tools are having a meaningful impact on health outcomes. A recent report, Digital Health Trends 2021: Innovation, Evidence, Regulation, and Adoption, offered by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, looks at the proliferation of digital health tools, recent innovations in the market, and contributions and barriers to their adoption.

With the recent onslaught of ransomware attacks, it’s time to revisit force majeure clauses (again). Earlier in the pandemic, we reviewed how COVID-19 could impact force majeure provisions. Since then, there has been a flurry of analyzing, renegotiating, and testing contractual language, as parties work through, or anticipate, pandemic-related difficulties. While contracting parties focus on striking a balance of when, and to what extent, a party’s performance will be excused due to pandemic-related circumstances, a different threat could follow a similar trajectory.

The European Commission (the Commission) began to invite feedback on April 1 on its roadmap to strengthen the Code of Practice on Disinformation (the Code) via new guidance. The roadmap was released in response to perceived failings of the Code to date to tackle the spread of disinformation on online platforms.

Cybersecurity has earned its place at the top of organizations’ risk concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working, an array of communication solutions and hardware being used by organizations, and the accelerated leveraging of cloud-based outsourcing solutions have increased the chain of potential vulnerabilities to cyberattacks.

As we noted in our Outsourcing 2021 webinar last week, a lot has happened and changed in the last 12 months since January 2020. There have been significant and unprecedented changes in the way our companies do business, the way we engage and interact with colleagues, and the way we interact with external parties, including how our companies and each of us leverage technology to market, process transactions, and otherwise communicate.

An annual survey found that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has influenced decisions made by state chief information officers (CIOs) in 2020 in all areas addressed by the survey. The 2020 State CIO Survey (the Survey) released by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, Grant Thornton Public Sector LLC and CompTIA (Sponsoring Organizations) was conducted several weeks after the start of COVID-19 and includes the responses from 47 state and territory CIOs.

Information Services Group (ISG) reported that the global outsourcing industry is slowly recovering from the industry’s dip in performance during the second quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). Data measuring commercial outsourcing contracts with annual contract values (ACV) of $5 million or more show that third-quarter ACV for the global market rose 3% to $14.6 billion.