Now more than ever, we are thinking about risk and what we can do to mitigate it. One important element to this is legal risk, something that organisations find hard to sensibly include their legal risk into risk assessments. Do you know what legal risk you might be carrying?
PROELIUM LAW – LEGAL RISK MAP ®
Organisations find it hard to sensibly include their legal risk in their risk assessments. A beneficial approach can be to consider your legal risk across a number of themes, taking a view on how well you address each one.
Our legal risk mapping is a basic review of your organisation’s legal health. It looks at how well your legal structure covers you and should be considered a central part of your risk analysis and risk management. The legal risk map considers the following themes:
Theme 1 – Corporate structures and responsibilities, including memorandum of association, articles of association and shareholders agreements or if your organisation is a registered charity or NGO.
Theme 2 – Policies, including (for instance): day-to-day functioning of your company; anti-money laundering; anti bribery and corruption; third party suppliers; travel and duty of care.
Theme 3 – Commercial contracts – with third party suppliers and clients.
Theme 4 – Business continuity and succession planning.
Theme 5 – Staff and consultant contracts, their rights to work and visas.
Theme 6 – Host nation and local laws for overseas projects, extra-territorial laws and sanctions, immigration and tax and work permits.
Theme 7 – Duty of care. Essential to limit your exposure to negligence claims.
Theme 8 – Insurance and whether it is adequate or not.
Theme 9 – Accreditations, whether you would be ready and their usefulness.
Theme 10 – Use of weapons and armoured vehicles, dual-use goods (if applicable) and private security companies.
Theme 11 – Data Protection and Cyber. Data protection, to conform to the Data Protection Act 2018 (known as GDPR); privacy policies; protecting your company from the risk of cyber attacks; use of computer hardware and software.
Theme 12 – Intellectual Property. Understand what Intellectual Property you own, or might own and not realise, is important for the value of your business.
A further step would then be to plot your scores on a radar chart, to help visualise your organisation’s risk. By clever scoring you can achieve a chart whereby a tight circle in the centre of the radar chart would be the desirable goal.
To discover Proelium Law Legal Risk Map Questionnaire click here. We offer a one hour, no-obligation, free chat to discuss your results and what you can to to mitigate your legal risk. If you would like to know more about our services, please contact us.
Legal Risk Map – further information
Most companies (rightly) focus on operational delivery. The danger of focusing on the task too much, without taking care of the supporting processes, is that:
- Hard-earned profits can disappear
- The company can become open to litigation
- Staff fail to understand the company processes
- Reputations can be irretrievably damaged.
As ever, there needs to be balance across a company’s activities to get the ‘tail to teeth’ ratio just right.
We have found that among other ‘tail’ activities, such as logistics or HR, the legal aspects tend to be overlooked. This can be because legal language can be impenetrable, there is a fear of cost and there is a perception that ‘legals’ are not required – ‘if we don’t mess up, we don’t need legals’.
Each of these views can be valid, but the ‘do nothing’ option comes with risk.
We have designed the legal risk mapping service to remove the guesswork from this part of your operations.
As ever with risk, once it has been identified it can then be mitigated or accepted for what it is; the crucial first stage, though, is to identify the risk and that’s what our legal risk mapping process does.
We will ask you about your business, about your services and about any goods that you supply. Once we have reviewed everything, we will provide you with a legal risk map, showing where you are in relatively good shape and where we believe you may be carrying risk. We also provide a prioritised work plan to mitigate any risks we have identified.
The time and cost of the legal risk map depends on how deep you want us to go. Our free legal risk map takes an hour of your time (and about a day of ours) and provides an overview of your situation. You may decide that you want a fully detailed map or that you want us to focus on certain areas; in either of those cases, once we understand a little about you we will charge a set flat fee.
Of course you don’t have to act on our advice. We would say, though, be wary of cherry-picking the parts you like and ignoring the ones you don’t (or seem to be ‘too hard to do’) as you could create more problems than solutions. We will distinguish where we are pointing out a statutory requirement from where we suggest good practice.
No. Whilst at the initial stage we are not providing legal advice, it is an assessment of your current situation and we will treat all of our correspondence as confidential. We would never divulge details of our correspondence to a third party. If, following the initial stage, you ask us to deal with the areas highlighted you may be entitled to legal professional privilege.
You don’t have to use us as there is absolutely no obligation attached to the risk map. We do, though, believe we are best placed to help companies in our areas of specialisation. Another law firm is unlikely to just take our views without checking themselves, which means more time and expenditure for you.
This is quite understandable but rest assured the purpose is not to cause embarrassment, it’s to make sure you are set up (legally) for success. There are an army of law and regulatory requirements that even the best structured companies don’t know about or just don’t do very well. You are rightly focused on the delivery of your goods or services, let us focus on your legal infrastructure. Also rest assured that we immediately delete your information if you do not wish to give us instructions afterwards.
Need advice?Contact us to discuss your requirements and how we can help
