TRANSFORMING LEGAL SERVICES

C2P is an end-to-end compliance solution that incorporates an extensive document repository.This legislative Knowledge Base is the strategic platform from which impacts can be dynamically attributed to products. C2P just gets smarter the more product and activity information the client gives us.

Sarah-Jane Denton, head of C&R’s legal data team

The Regulations Avalanche
Global companies are struggling to handle the deluge of product legislation and supporting information that bombards them. Transforming this complex data into a readily understood form is a key role played by the lawyers and analysts who make up Compliance & Risks’ legal data team.

The scale of the regulatory compliance challenge for global businesses from all industry sectors is growing at an alarming rate. A rapidly emerging global consciousness around sustainability, crystalised in the recent Nobel peace awards and the UN GEO-4 report, puts imperatives centre stage. For businesses, the first hurdle in this urgent new world of requirements management is the regulatory landscape. Compliance & Risks (C&R) is the leading player in helping companies of all sizes knowledge-manage the requirements that apply to their products and activities from the ever growing mountain of regulations. The group of experts which make up C&R’s legal data team (LDT) interprets this legislation and converts it into an ‘intelligent’ format. This transformation creates a new layer of value and demands a specialised team to carry it out — “It’s a job that’s well suited to the analytical skills of a highly trained lawyer,” says Sarah-Jane Denton, head of C&R’s legal data team. C&R’s enterprise software and data service — C2P (Compliance-To-Product) — contains product, service, environmental and compliance legislation from over 40 countries. It holds this information — over 1,800 laws, regulations, international standards and supporting sources — in a central Knowledge Base (or ‘Hub’). “Most laws are complex and it takes experience to get to the heart of the matter, to drill down to the key requirements and present them appropriately to companies,” adds Denton. “Having worked in a major law firm, when I first saw the system in action I understood it was absolutely unique and wondered why no-one had thought of it before,” recalls Denton. “C2P is an end-to- end compliance solution that incorporates an extensive document repository. This legislative Knowledge Base is the strategic platform from which impacts can be dynamically attributed to products. C2P just gets smarter the more product and activity information the client gives us.”

Regulatory Innovation
The LDT enters existing and proposed legislation into the C2P Knowledge Base. When C&R receives a request for a particular law to be put into C2P format, the LDT checks the status of the law, including any amendments or more recent legislation in that field. In addition the team enters any useful Supporting Sources such as FAQ or guidance documents. This way users have the fullest possible picture of meanings and impacts without the need to track down and refer to several documents at once — saving time and increasing efficiency. Clients can follow the complete legislative lifecycle and incorporate impacts into their business processes at the earliest opportunity. Additional commentary from C&R data partner experts such as the global law firm Baker & McKenzie, and RoHS consultants ERA, adds an important complement to C&R’s service. The LDT also has a network of contacts at regulatory bodies worldwide, ensuring that C2P contains the latest information. A customer’s compliance staff can access and act upon this vital insight in their own C2P system.

“Before C2P came along, this service was either carried out in-house, or handed over to a legal firm, a process which certainly would have been extremely cumbersome as well as expensive,” says Denton. The common approach was a combination of separate systems, such as spreadsheets, emails, home-grown web sites and databases, to manage compliance. C2P replaces these with one, easy-to-use system which has been purpose-built for the job. Continues Denton: “To have a database of legislation available that is relevant to your sector, at your fingertips, and broken down in such an intelligent way is extremely valuable. A major advantage for the clients is that they only need go to one page in C2P to see how they’re affected by a particular piece of legislation.”

A Learning System
Obviously this is an invaluable asset to anyone managing a Product Stewardship programme. If you’re producing a product with, say, 30 major sub-assemblies and thousands of components, it can be complex to monitor the compliance process end to end. For Denton and her team, analysing client’s needs is therefore a continual learning exercise. The team works closely with individual customers to refine and customise the content of their own proprietary C2P systems. A customer’s system is closed to the outside world. Each customer determines who needs access to the content from its own staff, external consultants, stakeholders and C&R’s legal data team.The client can input confidential information directly or outsource this to C&R. “We create the legislative foundation, but then the customer will help us refine their individual system, adding in supporting pieces of legislation that are essential in order to have a complete regulatory overview,” says Denton. “In this way, specific legislation relevant to their particular company operations is brought into the picture and connected to internal specifications and documents.” C2P empowers in-house lawyers and compliance staff. It assists the Product Stewardship process and helps clients to focus on implementation. There is no product-focused system on the market that allows organisations to manage the impact of compliance events in the unique way that C2P does it. Legal firms, which specialise in interpretation and advice, are also looking at C2P to help them deliver their services more effectively. Many of these law firms are also part of C&R’s network of Policy Area Experts. “The team might be staffed by lawyers, but we’re not providing client-specific legal advice. We deliver the information and present it in a logical, easy to understand format,” says Denton. The output from C2P enables clients to drive the compliance process through to completion more quickly and effectively.

To have a database of legislation available that is relevant to your sector, at your fingertips, and broken down in such an intelligent way is extremely valuable. A major advantage for the clients is that they only need go to one page in C2P to see how they’re affected by a particular piece of legislation.

Sarah-Jane Denton

Reaching Beyond Traditional Boundaries
Because C2P is a web-based application, it increases visibility and connects key functions in real time across the organisation. This has benefited C&R’s team which uses C2P to manage its workflow. It also means C&R staff can take advantage of the collaboration and communication tools within C2P. C&R’s growing team of legal and regulatory specialists in the UK, Ireland and the US enters data into C2P’s Hub and customers’ secure systems. “There’s usually someone entering data into C2P, no matter what time of the day or night it is,” says Denton who, thanks to the inherent flexibility provided by the internet, currently trains new staff and manages the LDT from the UK office. Consistent input into the Hub and client systems means that C&R’s entire Knowledge Base is continuously evolving and becoming more valuable. Concludes Denton: “Ultimately, the work our team does helps to shape the sustainable products of the future and reduces the risk of products being recalled because they don’t meet external or internal requirements.”

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