Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

TECHNOLOGY TRANSACTIONS, OUTSOURCING, AND COMMERCIAL CONTRACTS NEWS FOR LAWYERS AND SOURCING PROFESSIONALS
In many standard service agreements, providers will typically be required to deliver their services in accordance with generally accepted industry standards and practices and with professionalism and a level of skill appropriate to the agreement’s demands. While this standard often serves as a benchmark, it is rarely spelled out in detail. To reduce ambiguity, some agreements may go a step further, introducing a defined term to capture the expected service quality.
We invite you to join us for the next installment of the Morgan Lewis M&A Academy webinar series on Tuesday, December 3, 2024, at 11:30 am ET.
We invite you to join us for Data 2025, our upcoming Tech & Sourcing webinar series. In this series of webinars, our lawyers will consider the key global challenges facing businesses in their use of data.
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.
Contract Corner
In the case of the ownership of intellectual property (IP) developed by a supplier as part of a service agreement with a customer, should the traditional position that the customer should own all developed IP always be the position agreed upon by the parties?
Our technology transactions, outsourcing, and commercial contracts team on October 30, 2024 held its annual industry summit in New York. The theme this year was Unleashing the Potential of Technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI). Attendees included in-house counsel and sourcing professionals across a number of industries, including representatives from the client and vendor side. The diverse audience led to highly interactive discussions among some of the leading voices in the tech and sourcing fields.
Contract Corner
Use restrictions in software as a service (SaaS) agreements work in tandem with the scope of access and use rights provisions to clarify the scope of a user’s right to use a SaaS solution. These restrictions will be extremely important to the SaaS provider, however, consideration of such restrictions is also paramount for the users of the SaaS solution.
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.
According to OECD data, by 2020 digital trade represented 25% of global trade, amounting to just under $5 trillion. Digitalization of economy is on the agenda for many national governments as they come to appreciate the transformative power of technology in reducing transactional expenses and improving the competitiveness of their economies.