LWIA Winners Large-21_616x372

Finalists: Hitachi Consulting UK; Macquarie/D2 Legal Technology (highly commended); Network Rail Infrastructure.

Coventry Building Society's in-house legal team received the coveted future of legal services innovation (in-house legal operations) prize for developing a framework to measure and report on legal risk within the wider group, and to put sufficient controls in place to ensure non-legal staff could identify and escalate potential legal issues.

This was complicated by the building society's migration of its legacy data systems to the cloud, where regulation is governed by a number of different authorities (namely the European Banking Authority, Prudential Regulatory Authority, Financial Conduct Authority, British Banking Association and the Information Commissioners' Office) with sometimes contradictory requirements.

That meant reviewing their protocols to produce a single data risk assessment tool identifying the more than 180 separate requirements that financial services companies must comply with to shift data to the cloud, and mapping them back against specific policy criteria to demonstrate to stakeholders that its data and systems security meets all necessary compliance standards.

"Providing a comprehensive picture on legal risks and ensuring these are reported on monthly has revolutionised how the legal function operates – it means that there are no surprises when it comes to assessing the organisation's legal risk position," said a Coventry Building Society executive.