Keeping pace in changing times with legal forms libraries

Sally Danby, cloud forms product manager at Advanced, reviews the current changing legal market and why legal forms libraries have become more useful and important than ever.

Regulatory change has always happened, but currently there are two particular accelerants: Brexit and the pandemic. Of course, Brexit has happened now, but actually many pending changes haven’t yet – since the deal detail is only now available. Changes will be fed through in the coming months, and will include, for example, changes to corporate law (such as the impact of where directors are domiciled) and to divorce law (such as looking at where the assets are). Intellectual property law is also heavily tied to EU legislation.

As much as the intention is to replicate EU law into UK statute initially, there’s still a likelihood of some future divergence. At the very least, references to EU legislation will need to be updated.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 is driving additional short notice regulatory changes – impacting everything from tax and how courts work, to repossession deadlines. The point is that firms need to keep up with this blizzard of change as efficiently as possible, yet undoubtedly remote working makes that harder. Firms can still conduct CPD and ‘lunch and learn’ sessions, albeit remotely. But people get their understanding of what’s changing in a number of ways and it’s nearly impossible to duplicate the ‘water-cooler grapevine’ of office chat when people are dispersed. For these reasons, legal forms libraries have become more useful and important than ever.

The benefit of legal forms libraries is that they ensure lawyers are using current forms at all times. Moreover, when the library is cloud-based, it ensures remote access to forms, at any time, on any device. It’s also advisable to seek out cloud-based legal forms libraries that provide enhanced functionality. The things I have in mind include a news feed that contain pending updates – so people are prepared for upcoming changes – and systems that gives users the option of continuing on with a superseded form or changing to the latest version.

Forms libraries reassure firms that users are always using the right form. They eliminate the costs of rejections, resubmissions and non-compliance. They relieve the firm of the now considerable task of continually checking on what’s new. The advantages of using forms libraries have always been apparent, but in today’s perfect storm of circumstances the case for using them is even stronger.