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Organizational resilience
Organizational resilience can be defined as the ability of an organization to adapt and respond to changing circumstances, withstand and recover from disruptions, and maintain its core functions and mission in the face of adversity. It involves the ability to anticipate, prevent, and manage risks and threats to the organization's operations, assets, reputation, and stakeholders. Organizational resilience is not just about surviving crises; it is more about thriving in the face of uncertainty and disruption. An extinction-level event for a company occurs very rarely; usually, it is the uncertain business environment that presents sudden challenges that need to be navigated. It requires a proactive and strategic approach to risk management and planning, as well as a culture of flexibility, modernized processes, collaboration, and continuous learning.
A resilient organization is better able to:
- Anticipate and prepare for potential threats and disruptions.
- Detect and respond quickly to incidents and emergencies.
- Recover from disruptions and resume normal operations as soon as possible.
- Learn from past experiences and continuously improve its resilience capabilities.
- Maintain its core functions and mission in the face of adversity, ensuring the well-being of its employees, customers, and stakeholders.
Importance of building organizational resilience in today's business landscape
We live in a rapidly evolving business environment, with every element of the external environment that confronts the business under constant pressure to change and evolve. From technology to customer choice, all are consistently being buffeted by change. This creates uncertainty, which gives rise to attendant risks. A new rule, technology, or an economic headwind can introduce sudden stress, which leads to risks of business and financial losses. Hence, there is a clear need for organizations to plan for and build internal resilience, ensuring that they have an agile and adaptable workplace and company. Thus, the role of the GC expands in times of disruption, requiring a rapid and accurate response.
Legaltech and resilience
An organization is a diversified and massive structure; let us focus on the Legal function and examine how Legaltech can have a positive influence on a culture of resilience within it. We need to realize that:
- Resilience within an organization is connected to compliance, regulations, as well as business.
- Resilience has a fundamentally close alignment with risk and how you manage it.
- Resilience is about managing the unexpected.
- Learn from past experiences and continuously improve its resilience capabilities.
- Maintain its core functions and mission in the face of adversity, ensuring the well-being of its employees, customers, and stakeholders.
Clearly, Resilience is something that develops from an organization’s operational and strategic capabilities and the ability to perform all its routine tasks consistently with ease, combined with the capacity to handle sudden situations with relative comfort if not total ease. Within the ambit of the legal function, this translates to a strong foundation of contracts, compliance, etc., that is robust enough to handle uncertainties, and a structure that enables handling disruptive change fast, like, for example, a sudden change of regulations that may cause serious damage if not addressed quickly.
How does this happen?
There are two ways in which this comes about. The paradigm presented by each of these is different, each is an independent scenario and Legaltech has a key role to play in each:
Disruptive change
From the perspective of the legal function, this usually arises from compliance or regulatory changes in the external environment, requiring a company to change its response. The risk here can range from a shutdown risk to market losses to heavy penalties if not addressed in time. For example, a new rule necessitates new labelling rules on products, including existing field stock. Unless compliance with this is ensured, the risk of heavy pecuniary damages is present. Another example is a new compliance requirement regarding insider trading or disclosure norms regarding shareholders or structural changes to company formation. All of these, if not responded to, can quickly escalate to extinction-level events.
Regular business operations
This area deals with day-to-day business operations. For example, a competitive change has mandated that the entire dealer network be provided fresh contracts. Any delay in rolling these out can lead to market share losses. A production innovation has meant that procurement has to step up its game with a new line of raw materials from existing or new vendors at scale. This is a sudden event yet one that could have been foreseen and planned for – and mitigated. Delays in this will result in production delays, leading to escalating costs and falling market shares.
Enter legaltech
Legaltech can help organizations respond quickly and effectively to unexpected events and emergencies as it assists in managing unplanned legal work, as the systems have acquired scalability, depth, and capacity. A contract management system – CLM – can automate and manage the rollout of fresh contracts in next to no time for both the sell-side and the buy-side examples highlighted above. A compliance system plus an entity management system can ensure a real-time response to compliance events – like the labelling issue above. This one could even transcend compliance as well as the contractual areas – if, for example, the production or part thereof is done by a subcontractor, which would necessitate the contracts to be amended as well.
Conclusion
Thus, legal technology increases and enhances the ability of the organization to respond to sudden events that require a rapid legal response, building resilience into the system apart from its main advantage of building efficiency and productivity. The importance of investing in legal tech for the long-term success and sustainability of organizations is thus one of centrality and vitality for any organization in the modern rapidly changing world.