Strategies for overcoming the top 5 challenges facing corporate legal counsels

Corporate in-house legal counsels face many challenges in finding a way to adequately handle the increasing complexity of a multitude of issues while controlling costs and outside vendors. These issues can overwhelm departments. Although corporate counsels are aware of the perceived enormity of matters such as privacy and data security, litigation, intellectual property, merger and acquisition, and regulations and enforcement, they are most likely ill-equipped to provide each item the attention it deserves especially considering the global multilingual implications which most matters will have. This blog series, will review the five biggest challenges corporate counsels contend with and the strategies teams can use to address the global multilingual concerns they have, kicking off the series with Privacy and Data Security:

#1: Privacy and data security

Privacy and data security has risen in prominence. Five or 10 years ago, this would have been a top-of-mind concern only to a few. Today corporate legal counsels regard it as the one of the most important challenges they face. While progress is being made, and general awareness of the issue has been achieved, a level of uncertainty and confusion remains about how to best approach the problem. Data privacy concerns are affecting how legal practitioners handle discovery and investigations, in an age of growing discoverable content, which is particularly important given that the volume of government or regulatory investigations has steadily increased. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has raised the stakes in the tension between eDiscovery obligations and privacy rights. GDPR and other data privacy regulations have changed the roles and responsibilities in organization around security and compliance. Legal departments need to seek ways to proactively navigate these compliance obstacles. 

Data security often comes at the cost of business productivity, and as the cost of the burden of responsibility for the handling of personally identifiable information increases, organizations are forced to reduce their preferred supplier pool. SDL’s secure translation supply chain solution provides an enterprise class, vendor agnostic, secure translation platform that allows you to combine regulatory compliance and translation best practice. Powered by SDL’s leading linguistic technologies your organization benefits from consistently applied terminology, your teams have full visibility of spend and leverage, and can easily flex your approved supplier pool to meet your needs. Securing the translation supply chain needn’t come at the cost of trusted suppliers, existing relationships or impact time to market. The translation supply chain is often the hidden weak spot in an organization's data compliance. Whether ensuring that material nonpublic information is not being accidentally transmitted exposing you to risk of insider dealing, or ensuring that you are not breaching your requirements or those of the General Data Protection Regulation. SDL’s secure translation supply chain gives you fully auditable, data custody of your translation processes and can be cascaded down through your outside counsel and consultants to create a replicable process across all of your legal vendors. 

Data security and privacy implications of using such pubic services have become a significant concern for global companies in any serious corporate governance initiative. While the convenience that these public MT platforms provide is appealing, corporate counsel should be mindful that these providers benefit from the content intake to improve their back-end technology. That information, in turn, is used to direct advertising efforts and boost revenue. SDL machine translation offers client managed MT that can be deployed on-premises or in a private cloud, keeping sensitive data safe and secure within an organization’s network. Additionally, SDL machine translation is a scalable and cost-effective MT solution that addresses the growing volume of content requiring instant translation. Maintaining data privacy, compliance and protection of intellectual property (IP) requires a secure MT process. Because it can be deployed on premise or in a private cloud, SDL ETS offers a secure, IT managed MT service, deterring organizations from exposing sensitive data to internet MT services. 

To find out how SDL can support your localizations and linguistic strategy, please visit our legal pages, which will provide more insight on what we can do for you. And if you'd like to read the next installment in the series, focused on regulation and enforcement, click here.