As part of our Spotlight series, we invited litigation partners Dana E. Becker (Philadelphia), Shon Lo (Chicago), and Krista Vink Venegas, Ph.D. (Chicago), to talk about recent trends and issues in IP-related and other commercial litigation that would be of particular interest to our readers. Dana, Shon, and Krista are deeply knowledgeable practitioners in the IP and commercial contracts space who handle a broad spectrum of leading-edge and high-profile litigation for our clients.
Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis
TECHNOLOGY TRANSACTIONS, OUTSOURCING, AND COMMERCIAL CONTRACTS NEWS FOR LAWYERS AND SOURCING PROFESSIONALS
When the topic of technology commercialization strategies comes up, the most common options typically mentioned include the sale of a technology or building a business around technology by selling products or providing licenses or subscriptions to technology-based solutions.
Despite global shocks and forecasts of a global recession, economies in the Middle East showed "extraordinarily fast" growth in 2022, according to the World Bank. The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain—all show commitment to further growth and place great value on diversification of their historically oil and gas dominated economies, with digital transformation, artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud-first, and emerging technologies at the core of their strategic development.
The UK government introduced its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill to Parliament for approval on April 25, 2023. The bill establishes a “pro-competition framework” for digital markets, specifically targeting a small number of tech firms with significant market power that will receive a “Strategic Market Status” (SMS) designation.
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).
Our presenters will address certain recommended provisions for terms of service, relevant questions to ask and issues to consider when planning to enter a new geographic market, as well as recommendations on how to manage risk with expanded regulatory requirements.
As part of our Spotlight series, we welcome Todd Liao, a partner in our Shanghai office who works with clients on a wide range of complex commercial and financial transactions and legal issues involving China. Todd is a thought leader on issues facing tech firms doing business in China, recently publishing articles on new measures for online advertising in China, data privacy, and key drivers of Asia’s tech scene. We caught up with Todd to discuss data privacy regulations in China and cross-border data transfers.
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.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently proposed expanding its Negative Option Rule to all subscription agreements. Businesses offering subscription services would be required to make it at least as easy for consumers to cancel a subscription service as it is to sign up for it. For example, if a consumer can sign up for a service online, then the consumer must also be able to cancel it online in the same number of steps (and not be required to cancel in person).