This week, I sat down with Jonathan Greenblatt, VP of Legal at LinkSquares, and Brittany Wayne, Commercial Counsel at LinkSquares, to learn more about the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) and how the legal team at LinkSquares is responding to recent changes. Check out this post for the Q&A session.
Q: Let’s start with the basics: What is an SCC?
A: In short, SCCs are clauses that must be included in contracts related to the European Union's data privacy rights. In particular, this language aims to protect personal data leaving the European Economic Area (EEA) through contractual obligations.
For our portfolio of agreements, we need to ensure all the contracts that need SCCs associated with them… have SCCs associated with them. That’s something that the legal team at LinkSquares is always thinking about.
Q: Why are we talking about them now?
A: In the summer of 2021, as part of the GDPR and following the ruling on the Schrems II case, all contracts containing “old” SCC language must be updated by December 27, 2022. You can read more about the deadlines here.
With the recent updates, we need to make sure that by December 27th, we know which counterparties we’ll need to contact to update the language of the agreements. We don’t want to do this in December, though; we’ll ideally know by September to kick off conversations with vendors before it’s too late.
Q: How will you achieve this? What’s the process?
A: In a world without LinkSquares, we’d perform an audit. We’d find every vendor contract that deals with EU data and review them to make sure they have SCCs incorporated in the language before the December deadline. Bottom line, it would be very time-consuming and manual.
But…
We have LinkSquares Analyze, a contract repository that allows us to track the language and content of our contracts. LinkSquares’ AI-driven Smart Values extract information from contracts, surfacing the details. These SCC Smart Values identify SCC language in the agreement and help us understand if it has been updated.
With the SCC Smart Values, we can run a report, which only takes a few minutes, to identify which contracts have SCCs, and which documents need to be updated. Quick and simple. With the extra time saved by automating the manual research process, we can focus on what we do best: Tackling the needs of a rapidly-growing company.
What’s next?
This is just the start. These Smart Values will provide value in dividends since this likely isn’t the last update to GDPR. As GDPR language evolves, we can run regular audits of LinkSquares’ entire contract repository to ensure organizational compliance.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo and see how you can put Smart Values to use for your contract repository today.
