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Taming the Data Privacy Chaos in Contract Management

By Gretchen Bakhshai
March 01, 2022

Data privacy regulations are evolving constantly and rapidly. Enterprises and their legal teams spend millions of dollars and countless hours trying to manage compliance. This convoluted process is further complicated by the continuous stream of new rulings emanating from states including California, Virginia, Colorado and others, as well as far greater focus on data privacy from U.S. and international regulatory bodies. This has resulted in fines being imposed more frequently, and in historically high amounts. For example, in Q1 of 2021 alone the EU's General Data Protection Regulation issued fines totaling nearly €1 billion — 20 times greater than the totals for Q1 and Q2 2021 combined.

Legal professionals involved in contract management need to deploy exceptional and valuable skills. Chief among these is advanced — and human — knowledge of local, state, and national contract laws, prowess in negotiation, fluency in written and verbal communication, and great time-management. Yet these skills are challenged by the escalating volume of work caused by regulatory shifts. In some organizations, active contracts can number tens or even hundreds of thousands, yet the wording of any new or adjusted contract document must be scrutinized for compliance with the most up-to-date regulations. With vast volumes of fine print for constant review — an average of three billion words in typical Fortune 500 company contracts — there's more incentive than ever before to find ways to avoid diverting excessive resources to keeping contracts compliant.

Therefore, it is prudent, if not critical, that the legal industry assesses alternative approaches to tackle data privacy and contract compliance issues. One such approach that will be discussed later in the article (the agile approach) details how to pair lighter workflow guidance and assume greater human knowledge for an overall optimized outcome to contract assessment.

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