Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

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.

The UK government published a Green Paper on December 15 that includes proposals to shape the future of public procurement in the United Kingdom by speeding up and simplifying public sector procurement processes.

The World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) held its third “Conversation on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence” on November 4, 2020, to discuss its revised issues paper on Intellectual Property Policy and Artificial Intelligence.

The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA), which expands consumer privacy rights, passed as California Proposition 24 on November 3, 2020.

You signed a deal with the US subsidiary of an India-based service provider, and the Indian parent issued a guaranty. Several years later, you are now amending the original master services agreement (MSA) to add to the scope or extend the term, and you are faced with the question of whether you need the guarantor to reconfirm that the guaranty continues in effect to the MSA, as amended— the best course of action is that you do.

When a company desires to develop technology, it has two options: develop the technology in-house by its employees, or contract with a third-party developer to develop the technology. Any time a company contracts with a third party to develop technology for the company, one of the key issues in the agreement should be allocation of intellectual property ownership.

We are kicking off our Tech & Sourcing webinar series on October 13 with our first event, Service Engagements and Business Continuity: A Fresh Look. Morgan Lewis partners Barbara Melby and Michael Pillion will address the evolving approaches in services engagements, including how to address and allocate responsibility for unanticipated business interruptions and business continuity requirements.

With the world in various states of lockdown, your organization’s online presence is more important than ever…even more so with official enforcement of CCPA beginning last month. It may be a good time to spend an afternoon reviewing and updating the legal boilerplate on your organization’s website. Here is what we recommend for a basic three-part review to get you started:

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced on July 8 that the guidelines issued by the European Insurance and Occupational Pension Authority (EIOPA) on outsourcing to cloud service providers are not applicable to regulated activities (in this instance, insurance and reinsurance undertakings) within the UK jurisdiction.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its draft guidelines on outsourcing to cloud service providers on June 3. Steven Maijoor, the chair of ESMA, indicated that the purpose of the guidelines is to “help firms understand and mitigate the risks that they are exposed to when outsourcing to cloud service providers.”