Legal Operations and Compliance Auditing
You may be wondering exactly how legal operations software aids in audit compliance. Audits are not a legal function, and the cross-functional nature of audits require significant collaboration across many departments. So, what does legal operations software have to do with audits?
Project management.
When a compliance team approaches an audit, they are simply managing a project. Compliance is the audit project leader and the rest of the organization is contributing and providing deliverables as needed.
Here are two ways that legal and compliance teams can utilize legal ops tools while conducting an audit:
- As a project management tool for the compliance team
- As a database/reporting tool for pulling legal information required for the audit
Project Management for Compliance
Legal operations software like ALOE can easily be expanded to Compliance teams for their use. These tools use project management principles and apply them to whatever work is being done. Compliance teams can manage an audit in a project management tool by tracking all related tasks, deadlines, and stages of the audit in one place.
Tracking Related Tasks
One way compliance teams might track related tasks is through sub-tasks within their audit. These can be used as requests for the collection of data for the audit, to review the data, or to generate detailed reports about certain data sets (or the entire audit). The below image shows just a few possible tasks in an audit, but more importantly shows how you can see what stage these tasks are in and who is responsible for them. This kind at-a-glance reference is a huge benefit to compliance project managers.
Managing Audit Deadlines
Audit managers can split up the audit project into stages within the tool so they can access up-to-the-minute reports any time. These can be sent via email alerts, complete project email reports, shown on dashboards, Kanban boards, timelines, and more. Compliance team members can share reports across their team or to their organization as a whole. Below is an example of what a timeline report could look like.
By thinking about an audit through the lens of project management, compliance teams can take advantage of technology and existing legal operations tools in their organizations to manage and document their audits.
Pulling Legal Information
Legal ops tools enable easy collection of legal information for corporate audits. A few examples of quick and easy reports you can pull in a legal ops tool like ALOE are:
- Exclusivity provisions
- Notice before assignment requirements
- Customer information
- GDPR provisions
- Disputes
- Employment agreements
When using the same tool for pulling legal information and tracking the compliance audit project, you can keep everything in one place. Any other compiled data for the audit can be uploaded into the system and stored in a central location for ease of access during the audit and easy recall in the future.