Corporate Counsel Business Journal Discusses Customized Tech Tools with Akin Gump International Trade Team

Corporate Counsel Business Journal spoke with three members of Akin Gump’s international trade team for the article “Stepping Up Service with Customized Tech Tools for Compliance & Investigations.” Partner Thomas McCarthy, who leads the practice, along with counsel Jaelyn Judelson and Anne Borkovic discussed the success of the firm’s compliance and investigations work and the ways in which Akin Gump has developed innovative solutions to assist clients in managing legal requirements.

McCarthy said there was an upswing in enforcement trends more than a decade ago that had a big impact on clients, particularly export controls, sanctions and anticorruption. It became clear, he said, “that the old models involving the delivery of legal services – for example, memos, procedure drafting and investigations – were not sufficient to address the range of needs in this changing environment.” Many clients, he pointed out, wanted practical solutions to address ­immediate operational problems.

Judelson and Borkovic described what some of the problems were and how they helped solve them for clients. McCarthy described tracking tools developed by the firm “that allow cradle-to-grave management of compliance incidents tailored to aerospace and defense clients.” He also highlighted an anti-boycott decision and tracking tool for a company in the medical devices industry.

Borkovic encouraged in-house attorneys “to push their outside legal service providers to innovate in the way that they solve problems.” By adding an IT resource, she said, legal departments can gain more options and insight.

Predicting what may come in the future, Borkovic said she thinks there will be “a lot of activity and focus on cryptocurrency – on using blockchain security to help further the currency itself and the acceptance of different formats of currency, and then applying those concepts in other compliance efforts such as managing the supply chain, tracing where things came from and demonstrating compliance with regulations.”

Judelson expects big data to be a focus at law firms and in the private sector. “There’s an expectation on the part of regulators,” she said, “that companies understand the data they have, where it’s located and the regulations that may apply to that data. There’s also an expectation that companies can forensically answer questions about that data, wherever it’s located.”

To read the full interview, please click here.