Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

Annual spending worldwide on cloud services is expected to increase by 23% in 2021, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, which cites a forecast by IT research and consulting firm Gartner Inc. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have shifted to cloud-based services to support remote work, but businesses are also using the shift in attitudes toward cloud services to move more complex IT needs to the cloud. The article reasons that the push to use cloud services may also be due to the hybrid workplace model that many businesses are adopting, where workers can work both in the office and from home. This model requires that remote workers have access to critical software and infrastructure.

We recently noted that the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published the outcome of a review into the factors that determine failure or success when implementing technology change in the financial services sector and discussed the importance of this review for firms seeking to improve the operational resiliency of their technology change management process.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published its findings on an extensive review into the factors which determine failure or success when implementing technology change in the financial services sector.

In a March 2020 LawFlash, we highlighted that restrictions on service delivery locations and remote work could become key issues during the pandemic. Remote work was one of our five key issues in outsourcing and managed services in a follow-up article in June 2020. Our experience has since proven both articles to be correct. This Contract Corner will review the specific provisions that need to be reviewed based on continued remote work arrangements.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on January 13 that it had completed its review of a proposed joint patent licensing pool known as the University Technology Licensing Program (UTLP) of 15 participating universities. The DOJ concluded that the UTLP was unlikely to harm competition and would benefit licensees and the public to the extent that the UTLP would make it easier to commercialize inventions that may be currently unlicensed or underutilized.

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’re almost a month into the New Year, we thought this would be the perfect time to share nine areas of your service agreement templates that you should consider reviewing and updating to ensure you start 2021 on the right foot. Some of these suggestions may seem like no-brainers, but they’re on the list for a reason, trust us.

Welcome to the first post in our Spotlight series, where we will talk with a leader in a particular field or emerging area of interest to technology and sourcing lawyers and professionals.

Planning for a change in service providers can sometimes feel like a logistical nightmare, but with proper planning and a long-term outlook, you can ward off operational issues that may arise during the process of transitioning back in-house or to a replacement provider. In this post, we’ll discuss at a high level some of the items to consider when planning a change in service providers, or ideally to consider and build into any new service provider agreement at the outset.

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.