Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

Information Services Group (ISG) reported that the global outsourcing industry is slowly recovering from the industry’s dip in performance during the second quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). Data measuring commercial outsourcing contracts with annual contract values (ACV) of $5 million or more show that third-quarter ACV for the global market rose 3% to $14.6 billion.

We are kicking off our Tech & Sourcing webinar series on October 13 with our first event, Service Engagements and Business Continuity: A Fresh Look. Morgan Lewis partners Barbara Melby and Michael Pillion will address the evolving approaches in services engagements, including how to address and allocate responsibility for unanticipated business interruptions and business continuity requirements.

With the world in various states of lockdown, your organization’s online presence is more important than ever…even more so with official enforcement of CCPA beginning last month. It may be a good time to spend an afternoon reviewing and updating the legal boilerplate on your organization’s website. Here is what we recommend for a basic three-part review to get you started:

Adding corporate flexibility to IT-related commercial contracts can make seemingly unrelated mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions a bit less complex.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced on July 8 that the guidelines issued by the European Insurance and Occupational Pension Authority (EIOPA) on outsourcing to cloud service providers are not applicable to regulated activities (in this instance, insurance and reinsurance undertakings) within the UK jurisdiction.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its draft guidelines on outsourcing to cloud service providers on June 3. Steven Maijoor, the chair of ESMA, indicated that the purpose of the guidelines is to “help firms understand and mitigate the risks that they are exposed to when outsourcing to cloud service providers.”

Although many companies are already revisiting contractual provisions relating to nonperformance, like force majeure clauses, as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to wreak havoc on public health and the economy.

In a prior series of posts, we discussed issues relating to intellectual property indemnification, including some exceptions, remedies, and allocation of liability. Given that these provisions often involve taxing negotiations and that many technologies have become intertwined, below we explore some nuanced—and frequently sticky—issues regarding third-party products and how they can be resolved.

In the wake of the reinvigorated call for equality and greater diversity and inclusion, many companies—largely through their procurement organizations—are taking the opportunity to revisit their diversity supplier programs, including assessing impact and reevaluating best practices for pursuing supplier diversity and tracking the impact of these programs.

In an ideal outsourcing relationship, technology transformation through innovation, continuous improvement, and future project work is never really “over.”