When in-house lawyers say they do reporting on legal risks (or at least when they say they want to set up a procedure for it), they actually mean two different things.
For some, it means reporting on legal risks that relate to specific projects or matters. The reporting, in that case, will look like a list a pending issues whith a certain level of legal risk: a litigation case, a difficult negotiation, a transaction, a claim from a supplier, a new European regulation that might impact the business, etc. This is all right, but it remains very much reactive.
Another approach is to define a global model of legal risk identification and assessment, and to apply it proactively to assess legal risk. It is not based on an ad hoc assessment of projects or matters, but on an understanding of the business model and a definition of the main legal risks pertaining to it. It is not ad hoc description, but a systematic, global and proactive risk mapping that allows to anticipate problems, instead of reacting when they materialise.
Antoine Henry de Frahan
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Posted by: violin maker | June 14, 2011 at 08:21 AM