Every company faces an array of risks on a daily basis. Some risk areas are universal, such as the threat of litigation and privacy regulations, such as HIPAA. Others are unique to specific industries, such as FTC information requests for the financial sector or FDA investigations for the pharmaceutical market. Still others depend on a companys litigation portfolio, varying in scope depending on the type, size, and amount of litigation an organization faces.

Historically, in-house counsel have dealt with these various risk areas separately, oftentimes relying on a reactive process that creates costly inefficiencies, lacks a system of controls, and exposes the company to additional risk. Due to increasing compliance concerns, such as the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and electronic discovery, as well as internal pressure to reduce costs and operate within the scope of a budget, this is no longer an effective way to manage risk. 

The future of risk mitigation and compliance is Legal GRC. GRC stands for governance, risk, and compliance. Legal GRC is a holistic approach to risk mitigation and compliance that is built on a foundation of identifying risk areas, creating processes and policies to mitigate these risks, instituting controls to ensure compliance with internal and external policies, and benchmarking metrics associated with risk areas in an effort to track the success of the GRC initiative. In addition, Legal GRC is a proactive approach that requires corporate legal teams to work with other departments across the enterprise to ensure the company as a whole understands and implements a set of processes and policies to accomplish the unified goal of risk mitigation and compliance.

Successful Legal GRC initiatives will require both strategic vision and proactive implementation. That vision leverages a combination of policies, processes, and technologies to manage corporate information at all levels. Effective implementation requires a robust operational framework to enable and enforce Legal GRC policies and procedures. Companies adopting these approaches will benefit from a more consistent and policy-based approach to compliance, improved data control and management, and better reporting capabilities. These, in turn, reward companies with mitigated risk, reduced compliance costs, and increased shareholder value.

This is why Exterro is proud to announce the Legal GRC Center for Innovation, a thought leadership forum dedicated to helping companies understand the impact and implications of legal governance and compliance on business performance, processes, and systems. Sponsored by Exterro and lead by a self-governing board of members, this will be a collaborative effort in which companies and professionals help each other. Participants will share experiences and develop insights about how legal teams can formulate and implement efficient and effective risk management, governance and compliance processes. Through a variety of informal gatherings, interactive thought sessions, roundtable events, online discussion forums, and other means defined by its membership, the Center for Innovation will provide corporate legal teams with insights into how governance and legal compliance impact business units and will help legal teams formulate and implement efficient and effective responses to increasing regulatory and litigation-related areas of compliance.