Richard Kemp of Kemp IT Law has critically assessed the trends for IT lawyers that lie ahead in 2018. His analysis is comprehensive and worth a read if you are in the business of negotiating IT contracts. There’s a lot to brush up on in order to do a good job of managing risks in emerging technology contracts.
Of all the trends he mentions, I think GDPR will probably be the biggest deal for lawyers and procurement this year, both in the work required to retrofit existing agreements and incorporating the obligations into anything new. Brexit will also affect anyone based in or dealing with the UK. How, of course, is anyone’s guess still. And there’s that talk of a second referendum so who knows how that will all pan out.
Beyond his analysis of the trends, he also makes some astute observations regarding software and how it operates that I think will have profound effects on what goes into contracts. Anyone who is currently charged with striking tech deals and contracting for them had better ensure they have a good grasp of the way in which software itself is changing under the hood. We are at an inflection point at which software is going to change dramatically and old concepts and ways of contracting for licences and maintenance are no longer adequate. And it’s not just about SaaS either…
In particular, Mr Kemp calls out:
- DevOps adoption by development teams is accelerating the software development lifecycle (“shorter cycles, higher deployment frequency”)
- ‘containerisation’ of apps and greater re-use of components is creating more complex software interactions
- SOA (service oriented architecture) and RPA (robotic process automation) deployments mean software systems will increasingly communicate indirectly with other systems
His advice is to ensure you:
- understand the ownership and licensing arrangements of the entire code base so the right permissions are accounted for
- check software licence grant clauses to confirm that calls on the licensed software by remote, indirect systems will not incur extra charges
- check the ownership and permissions for any data processed by the software
Keeping on top of workloads is a challenge for many IT procurement and legal folks but there’s no point in doing the work if it’s wrong. So keeping on top of trends is as necessary as doing the job itself. Making the time to understand these so that we know what implications they have in IT contracts has not been this critical since the arrival of the PC.