As Mike emphasized, some companies were able to pivot to meet these challenges and maintain business continuity and mitigate risk and negative impacts.  That was partially due to utilizing the right tools and approaches, but he made it clear how “the resiliency of human nature” played a great role in allowing our EMEA clients to weather the storm.

Drivers of change

What are some of the factors we’ve seen driving the rapid transformation of the legal and risk management landscape?  Mike spoke to…

• The growing importance of legal departments within organizations
• The increasing scale of corporate legal operations
• The pivot to remote and mobile enterprise legal workforces
• Growing use of cloud-based technologies

What factors are impacting the broader risk management environment for companies?

• Risk management is increasingly a C-level priority
• An increased focus on resiliency
• A shift to recognizing how the pervasiveness of digital channels is driving risk
• A focus on the cloud as a way to quickly implement solutions

The solutions for meeting the challenges

“Let’s take advantage of the tools we have,” Mike said, and he was able to walk attendees through the expansive range of solutions Mitratech has been able to build to serve client needs.

Recent additions like ContractRoom and AdvanceLaw have bolstered the lineup even further, resulting in an end-to-end portfolio that’s more extensive than any other.

The objective? To help organizations “manage the overwhelming complexity” of risks that modern enterprises are forced to confront every day.

We hope these excerpts will encourage you to check out what proved to be a rich and deep discussion by three of the top pundits in legal risk and compliance.  We’re sure it’ll be worth your time, and it’s worth it just to hear Michael Rasmussen citing The Lord of the Rings in regard to risk management.

Our keynote panel delivered extraordinary insights

Beyond this introductory overview, Mike was able to introduce a remarkable panel of industry experts to delve into the complexities and ramifications of where we’ve been and where we’re headed in legal and risk management.  Michael Rasmussen, GRC Analyst & Pundit at GRC 20/20 Research, LLC, Ryan O’Leary, Research Manager, Privacy and Legal Technology at IDC, and Andrew Beckett, Managing Director, Cyber and Investigations for EMEA at Kroll were on hand to share their views, and we can’t do it justice in a single blogpost – better for you to check out the complete video here.

But just to share a few of their comments and insights:

Every Organization has some approach to governance risk and compliance and there’s varying levels of integration…the question is, how mature is it? And what can we do to make it more efficient, effective, and agile in the organization?

…A lot of times you look at enterprise and operational risk management programs and they’re not balanced…you would think that the only risk is information security and cyber security risk, whihc is a huge risk…(but) we need to start looking at other risks, like the environmental and health and safety risks and bring that up into the enterprise and operations management strategies.

Michael Rasmussen

Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring cyber(risk) because you don’t understand it isn’t a strategy…so you know we’re seeing GMC teams addressing that and picking up that particular baton and helping to address it.

…California CCPA has raised the (data privacy) bar yet further with regard to compliance requirements…in APAC, we’re also seeing new standards being readied for introduction in places like Singapore and China.  It’s almost becoming an arms race, (as to) who can demonstrate that they are stricter about returning control of personal data to the consumer.

Andrew Beckett

We spent a lot of time thinking about what we call the future of trust…(in)pretty much most enterprise decisions at this point, a huge strategic driving factor is engendering trust in the organization.

…Not only do you need somebody who is really passionate, or a number of people who are passionate about crafting policies, but you actually need to follow them because they can’t just be empty shell documents to show, ‘oh yeah, we have you know we have a policy, but yeah nobody really cares.’

Ryan O’Leary