Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

As we reach the end of 2023, we have once again compiled all of 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.

Deloitte has issued a biennial report that identifies trends that are impacting customer/client contact center operations. The respondents surveyed by Deloitte represented both internal- and external-facing contact centers. This blog post summarizes some key trends outlined in the report.

While the regulatory landscape around artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, navigating contractual arrangements and apportioning risk for the use of AI may seem like stepping into the unknown. In this blog post, we consider how a few familiar concepts within commercial contracts may be applied to the provision and use of AI tools as part of services.

The EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) became effective on July 10, and on the same day, the European Commission adopted an Adequacy Decision relating to the DPF, as a successor of the EU-US Privacy Shield. While only those companies subject to the jurisdiction of either the Federal Trade Commission or the US Department of Transportation are eligible to self-certify their compliance with the DPF, the scope of eligibility is likely to broaden in the future.

We recently wrote about the emerging trend of content moderation outsourcing. In this blog post, we turn our attention to another growing trend: legal process outsourcing.

Open-source software (OSS) representations and warranties are an integral part of the intellectual property (IP) representations and warranties in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions and financings, as M&A transaction documents regularly include requests for a seller to represent and warrant that it has policies in place regarding the use of OSS, has provided such policies to the acquirer or investor, and has not deviated from such policies. These representations and warranties are important, but they are routinely and necessarily backstopped by the due diligence process.

In our prior post in this two-part series on less commonly discussed technology commercialization options, we addressed how open-source software (OSS) providers may make money on their products. In this Part 2, we’ll look at another technology commercialization strategy, white labeling.

A recently released Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Market report indicates significant continued growth in the BPO sector over the next decade. The results of the study on which the report is based show an expected growth from the 2022 market of $245.9 billion to $544.8 billion in 2032, an 8.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

The UK communications regulator and concurrent competition authority, Ofcom, announced on April 5 its proposal to refer the UK cloud services market to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for further investigation. This coincided with publication of the interim report of Ofcom’s market study of the largest providers of cloud services (referred to by the authority as “hyperscalers”) in the United Kingdom’s £15 billion ($18.7 billion) cloud services market.

As noted in our recent blog posts, The Rise of Next-Gen Business Process Outsourcing and Key Contracting Issues to Consider, the core premise of next-gen business process outsourcing (BPO) includes (1) the leveraging of automation, bots, performance tools, and other technology to transform and optimize workflows and business processes and (2) the implementation of solutions to collect and analyze data to improve user experiences and business outcomes. Next-gen BPO drives the development and implementation of transformative technology and the generation of critical business data. As such, the identification of key intellectual property (IP) and the allocation of IP use and ownership rights invariably becomes a gating issue in contract structuring and negotiations.