Ensuring your organisation is up-to-date with legislation that impacts its operations, activities and procedures is a fundamental cornerstone in ensuring compliance and meeting global standards such as ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 27001. A legal register plays a vital role in collating all relevant legislation and regulations, outlining compliance duties and facilitating access to compliance evaluation records.
With the regulatory landscape constantly evolving and changing business needs, a poorly maintained legal register can spell trouble for any business. Without a disciplined approach to creating and maintaining a legal register, it can quickly become an inaccessible, disjointed and ineffective catch-all that fails to keep your organisation informed, up-to-date and compliant.
Creating a legal register correctly will ensure your organisation is up to date with relevant legislation and provides an effective way to ensure compliance without wasting time or resources.
A legal register provides access to current legislation and regulations that your business must comply with. This list of legal instruments is determined by factors such as:
Businesses operating within more regulated sectors such as the environment, information security, data protection and health and safety will benefit from implementing a legal register.
Forget binders overflowing with paper documents, copies of legislation and manually created compliance records.
Though it is possible to create a legal register in little more than a spreadsheet, modern legal registers are agile, on-demand document and record-keeping systems – typically stored on a server or as part of a cloud platform – that store legal instruments and compliance records relevant to an organisation and its activities, premises, territories and industry sectors it operates in.
Modern, automated on-demand legal registers such as Activ Comply have streamlined the creation and maintenance of a legal register. To ensure it is up-to-date, Activ Comply provides dedicated access to an in-house legal team that evaluates new legislation and integrates new compliance requirements into the register along with real-time alerts.
Legal registers are usually required as part of ISO management systems, such as environmental (EMS), information security (ISMS) and occupational health and safety management systems (OHS). Some international standards such as ISO 14001, ISO 27001 and ISO 45001 mandate a legal register as part of certification.
While there is no general legal requirement for organisations to build and maintain a legal register, it is good practice and is a major plank in an organisations’ risk management strategy.
A legal register can help ensure organisations can:
It’s tempting to collect all and any regulations that may impact your business into a register. However, that can become unwieldy to use, and a more structured approach to creating an effective register should be followed.
A good legal register should include:
It’s important to create a focused, effective legal register, so you should avoid including:
It’s important that the register is regularly updated with new legislation or amendments to regulations, and that those changes are effectively cascaded to relevant teams and locations. New compliance evaluations should be undertaken and recorded when new regulations come into force.
This can be a time-consuming task. In-house risk management, legal or compliance teams are often responsible and need to routinely scour new regulations, trade and industry press and track legal developments. They will need to translate that into the register and manually alert affected areas of the business.
Options such as Activ Comply remove the hassle, cost and time from this process. Its on-demand system uses a team of in-house ISO lawyers that review the thousands of regulatory changes and update your legal register in real-time, sending out alerts and ensuring your business remains compliant.
If your business operates in regulated sectors or conducts regulated activities, then it makes sense to create a legal register.
If you have or are seeking ISO certification, then some ISO standards require that legal regulations are accessible and compliance evaluations are conducted as part of the management system, including:
Each ISO standard has specific requirements regarding the legal register format. While the ISO specifications don’t reference the term ‘legal register’, this has become the catch-all term to describe the need for an organisation to determine and ensure access to up-to-date legal requirements and compliance obligations.
Even if you’re not seeking ISO certification, a legal register can pay dividends in ensuring compliance, protecting your organisation from regulatory penalties and enhancing its reputation with customers and stakeholders.
This article first appeared on https://www.british-assessment.co.uk/insights/what-is-a-legal-register/
Andy Beverley, Activ’s Group Software Development Director is an entrepreneurial software developer with a solid technical background. This, coupled with a strong entrepreneurial flair has led him to become involved with multiple tech start-ups, one of which was InfoSaaS which later became Activ.
Andrew is the man behind the Activ product in terms of software conceptualisation, design, and development, and is the longest-serving member of the Activ team. Andrew was first employed to create a database for cost management and has previously been directly involved in the production environment of BS5750, prior...
Owen Roberts-Thomas is Activ’s Legal Team Manager. As well as being the man behind the Legislation Outlook, Owen’s team can provide expert legislation-related advice to our Activ Comply clients. Owen’s legal expertise lies in the environmental, health and safety and information security management fields, and...
