INTRODUCTION Contributed by: Kit Burden, DLA Piper LLP
with such corporate behemoths becomes more lim - ited, the role of legal advisers alters accordingly, ie, away from a concentration upon the negotiation and drafting of specific contract provisions, and towards advice on regulatory compliance, operational resil - ience and risk mitigation. Regulators in the financial services sector have been especially active in this regard, such that lawyers advising on projects involv - ing the financial services world need to be regulatory specialists in addition to their day jobs, at least inso - far as such regulations mandate particular contractual approaches or forms of drafting. On a perhaps less positive note, the spectre of cyber assaults and incidents continues to loom large, exac - erbated now not just by lone wolves and criminal syn - dicates, but also state actors with access to far more computer resources than ever before. Increasingly for large and small organisations alike, it feels less like “whether” a cyber attack will eventually penetrate through the corporate defences, but “when” (and with what impact). In the UK, the multi-month downtime experienced by Jaguar Land Rover provided a sober reality check for the potential impact upon not just an individual company, but also the wider commer - cial ecosystem they participate in. Customers again need to consider how their contracts should be set up to address such incidents, whilst suppliers need to assess whether traditional forms of drafting are still applicable (for example, how realistic is it to provide hard and fast Recovery Time Objective figures when it is known that the customer will want to take more time to bring its operations back up?). In the online world, the past few months have seen increased scrutiny on social media and the control and/or regulation of content. Australia is providing an ongoing experiment in terms of the banning of social media access for adolescents, and it remains to be seen whether other countries will follow suit. In the meantime, there is a continued focus on what the key social media giants could or should be doing to regulate the content on their platforms, and newly emerging litigation risks associated with the perceived addictive effect of certain online offerings (said by some to be the beginning of a new wave of litigation to be akin to the “Big Tobacco” litigation of past years).
Amongst all of the above, there is the spectre of con - tinued geopolitical instability and apparent shifts away from globalisation. These shifts can and are impacting upon technology lawyers and the advice we provide in a myriad set of ways, whether in terms of trying to predict the potential impact of sanctions or tariffs, through to considering the impact of supply chain dis - ruptions and the potential invocation of force majeure or “material adverse change” style contract provi - sions. For all of the disruption caused by the conflict in the Gulf, for example, one shudders to think what the global impact of conflict around Taiwan would be, given their global share of semiconductor chip pro - duction. So... to use the old Chinese proverb, “we live in inter - esting times”, with change coming from multiple directions and market forces seeming to shift on a day-to-day basis, there has never been a time when it has been more important to keep up to date with the latest legal developments and thinking, and for law - yers to position themselves accordingly as the trusted advisers to their clients as they seek to chart their own course through these uncertain times. Whether your own view of the tech-driven future is utopian or dystopian (or somewhere in between), this multi- jurisdictional guide should help serve to point the way forward.
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