How Technology Can Help with the Legal Aspects of Running Your Business

By Sophie Bond.

As a woman and CEO, you want to survive and thrive. It's widely recognised that the C-suite can be challenging, especially given how few women hold positions here. A recent post by Georgie Hill, Let's Get Real About Work-Life Balance, emphasises the importance of caring for yourself while overseeing and balancing the needs of a your business. Aside from recharging by bingeing your favourite Netflix show or heading to the spa occasionally, your self-care should involve working smarter, not harder. You can run your business smoothly without completely exhausting yourself by strategically tackling your responsibilities. 

One of the best ways to do so is by leveraging the right technology. Leaning again into the 'working smarter, not harder' mindset, Technology Magazine found that 36% prioritise acquiring new technologies to enhance efficiency and productivity. These technologies are especially useful for streamlining tasks you may not be particularly proficient in, including the more complex ones involving legalities.

If you need help handling the legal aspects of running your business, you don't need to lose sleep over them. Instead, turn to technology to more easily understand and accomplish necessary tasks, for example:

Reviewing contracts

Contract reviews are crucial if you want to fully protect your business interests. Carefully reviewing every legal agreement you have with clients, vendors, and other parties can help you spot misinterpretations, unfavourable terms and conditions, loopholes, and risks that can potentially hurt your company. However, this task can be particularly challenging if you're not familiar with legal jargon and what specific terms imply.

As seen in the features offered by the Definely platform, technology can help by giving you all the information you need in one place. Its legal document review tool uses AI to provide all the definitions you need as you edit and even suggest improvements to certain provisions, so you can easily ensure every contract you sign will genuinely benefit your business.

Ensuring compliance

Transparency is crucial to maintaining good relations with clients and stakeholders. It is mainly achieved by complying with government legislation and industry-specific regulations. However, doing so can be complicated since standards can vary depending on whether your company operates in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Regulations also change often, especially in fields like finance, which may make it difficult to keep track of and account for updates.

Here, technology can help your business avoid the legal risks and penalties that come with non-compliance. That includes industry-specific compliance software like 3E Insight for Food, which offers worldwide access to all the latest food and flavour regulations, and PowerDMS, which caters to the healthcare sector. The tax compliance tool Tax Systems illustrates that you can also automate compliance to more general financial standards. Thanks to its tax data management feature, you can more easily file everything from VAT to taxes that apply if you cater to clients overseas.

Accessing services

Though you can independently accomplish tasks such as reviewing contracts and ensuring compliance with the right tech tools, your business may still need to consult a professional down the line. Here, accessibility issues like affordability and availability may impact your ability to talk to a professional of good standing. Instead of wasting energy and other resources searching for the right law firm to help, you can similarly use technology to streamline the process. 

Today, platforms like Lawyers on Demand offer networks boasting more than 4,500 legal professionals. You can use them to consult lawyers, paralegals, and even risk & compliance professionals whenever you need their expertise. The flexibility these platforms provide can help overcome those accessibility barriers, so you can easily outsource the legal aspects of running your business without having to stress about where to look.

Tackling the legal aspects of running a business can add to the challenge of finding that all-important balance as a Female CEO. To avoid unnecessarily exhausting yourself, it's worth considering how technology can help to take some of that weight off your shoulders and give you back the most important commodity of all, your time.