How Blakes Set the Standard for Legislative Updates with a Custom Collaboration Portal Built for an International Online Retailer

Summary

When an international online retailer launched in Canada, it needed an efficient way to stay informed about frequently changing laws and regulations in this country’s numerous provincial, territorial and federal jurisdictions.

Our online solution, built using HighQ, delivered expert commentary from top-tier lawyers via a customized legislative update portal tailored to the client’s needs, replacing a laborious manual process that was heavily reliant on text documents.

Challenge

The internet has made the whole world a potential market for online businesses, but retailers need an efficient way to absorb local legal expertise if they want to ensure compliance and seize opportunities associated with each jurisdiction’s laws.

After opening up in Canada, a global online retailer with its headquarters in Europe sought regular legislative updates to stay on top of changing laws and regulations at the provincial, federal and territorial levels dealing with matters of privacy, tax, intellectual property and consumer protection, among others.

However, the industry standard for legislative updates is a cumbersome, generic and lengthy document that only highlights the amendments made to various laws, with minimal commentary from subject matter experts. As a result, clients often struggle to identify the legislative changes that require immediate or eventual action without sifting through significant amounts of paper or digital content.

Solution

Incorporating Blakes partner Jacqueline Shinfield’s knowledge of the retailer’s operations, and her extensive expertise in regulatory compliance, our legal and research teams partnered with our practice innovation group to construct a customized portal for legislatives updates, using the cloud-based product HighQ, which was tailored precisely to the client’s business.

At quarterly intervals, members of the Blakes legal research team classified and tagged every recent or pending legislative and regulatory amendment – providing details of the changes and links to the original sources for easy reference.

On the client side of the portal, the retailer’s compliance professionals could search and filter legislative updates by date, jurisdiction or area of law, allowing relevant stakeholders to focus quickly on the changes that mattered to them.

Messaging and commenting features allowed the client’s team to connect with one another or with Blakes professionals about individual legislative changes that may need additional attention. Users were also able to set up notifications to alert them to updates in areas of particular interest to them.

Results

Every quarter, Blakes lawyers input on average more than 65 legislative and regulatory updates from Canada’s 14 provincial, territorial and federal jurisdictions.

Our solution gives the online retailer the benefit of expert commentary from specialized professionals among our unrivalled team of 650 lawyers in five offices nationwide, driving value for the client by reducing the need for senior partner involvement in day-to-day communications.

A user-friendly dashboard tailored to the client’s needs ensures a seamless experience, improving efficiency by delivering only relevant legislative and regulatory changes.