The nature of a digitalisation strategy often means businesses are shifting direction or "pivoting" into new areas. More often than not, this means complying with different regulations to those you've been dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
This can be an intimidating prospect – your legal and business teams may be out of their comfort zone and need to upskill quickly to understand the new regulatory landscape, its impact on your proposed products and services and how it may affect your regulatory risk profile.
For example, shifting from selling your products or services via an intermediary to going direct to the end user, or building a digital customer journey, may mean the business is now subject to consumer and e-commerce regulation and has far greater exposure to data protection laws. It might also mean you'll be advertising for the first time, so have to get a handle on applicable advertising and marketing law. Moving to a subscription or "as a Service" model could possibly trigger financial services regulation. As your workforce moves to a digitally-enabled distributed structure, you'll also need to rethink how you meet your health and safety responsibilities to your staff.
More widely, regulators are having to change in response to the explosion of digital technology that is impacting on all aspects of society, on a global scale. We support our clients at a policy level in educating and influencing both regulators and legislators, helping to shape regulatory reform and ensure our clients' commercial interests are well represented in the debate.
