Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

TECHNOLOGY TRANSACTIONS, OUTSOURCING, AND COMMERCIAL CONTRACTS NEWS FOR LAWYERS AND SOURCING PROFESSIONALS
A new Morgan Lewis White Paper, Bipartisan Proposal Attempts to Provide Solutions for Comprehensive Regulation of Digital Assets, analyzes the proposed Responsible Financial Innovation Act (RFIA) in the United States from several different angles, including with respect to issues such as key definitions in this emerging space, jurisdiction, ancillary assets (which are not fully decentralized), stablecoin issuance, taxes, disclosures, and money transmission. 
Contract Corner
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.
In October 2021, it was announced that Facebook would formally change its name to Meta as part of an ambitious new initiative called the “metaverse”—a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Shortly after this announcement, we wrote a blog post, A Brief Overview of the Metaverse and the Legal Challenges It Will Present. Since then, metaverse trends have experienced phenomenal growth, with the emergence of new immersive virtual reality and collaborative spaces for human interactions, transactions, and data exchanges on decentralized networks.
Contract Corner
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.
Spotlight
Welcome to the conclusion of our two-part Spotlight post with Lee Harding in which we discuss key employment/labor and employment law issues in relation to UK and EU outsourcing transactions. In Part 1, we talked about key initial considerations and specific timescales involved.
Spotlight
In this two-part edition of our Spotlight series, we welcome Lee Harding to discuss key labor and employment law issues in relation to outsourcing transactions, predominantly in the United Kingdom and European Union.
When two parties come together to discuss a new idea or potential collaboration, the parties are usually operating under the protection of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If the parties decide to work together, they will most likely enter into a services agreement outlining their respective rights and obligations, including intellectual property (IP) ownership and commercialization rights. Occasionally, parties operating solely under an NDA may start collaborating in a way that’s not fully covered by the NDA prior to entering into a services agreement because they’re just not at that stage of the relationship yet. Regardless of whether the parties are ready to enter into such an agreement, if there is any potential for IP to be created in connection with such a collaboration (even if it’s fairly informal), the agreement between the parties needs to address the rights of each party with respect to any such IP.
Join partners Mike Pierides, from our London office, and Peter M. Watt-Morse, from our Pittsburgh office, at 12:00 pm ET on Tuesday, May 17 as they share highlights from the top articles posted over the past year on our Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis blog.
The Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence recently published its AI Index Report 2022. In a world of near-constant advancement and innovation in technology, it’s no surprise the report found that more global artificial intelligence (AI) legislation was proposed in 2021 than ever before.
Join partners Robert Mailer, Courtney C. Nowell, Andrew M. Ray, and Stephen C. Tirrell at 12:00 pm ET on March 30, 2022 as they delve into notable recent digital asset fund raises, trends in the market, the impacts of the proliferation of digital assets on private fund terms, and the approaches being taken by certain key players.