January 28, 2019
Financial Industry Leader Chooses Counself to Perform and Manage Outside Counsel and Third-Party Vendor Risk Assessments Necessary for Complying with FRB SR 13-19 Guidance.
NEWPORT BEACH, CA - Counself Inc. announced that it has partnered with one of the top 15 banks in the US to set best practices in legal vendor risk management.
The deal provides an exciting opportunity for Counself’s ISO 27001 certified, cloud-based platform to be used in securely performing, maintaining, and renewing due diligence and ongoing evaluations of outside counsel and other legal service providers. Counself will be rolled out to assist this Legal Department’s in-house counsel organize and access a list of approved vendors and outside counsel in one centralized compliance hub.
With growing reliance on cloud-based applications, the financial industry in particular is facing a maze of evolving regulatory oversight. Regulations such as FRB SR 13-19, OCC Bulletins 2013-29 and 2017-21, and FDIC-FIL-44-2008 require risk assessments for all vendors (including law firms), standardized engagement letter/contract provisions, and ongoing monitoring and accountability.
"We are proud to have been chosen by one of the largest financial institutions in the US to optimize their vendor and outside counsel management program," said Mori Kabiri, the founder and CEO of Counself. “Our client is relieved to see their arduous and manual process will be streamlined, transforming the compliance evaluation process with our secure, collaborative, and automated solution.”
Designed intelligently for Legal Operations, users can take advantage of Counself’s library of best practice forms, questionnaires, documents, and request templates to expedite their compliance gathering process, as well as automated event notifications, collaboration tools, and reporting to better manage their vendor relationships. For further productivity, Counself is fully integrated with many other applications such as DocuSign, Office 365, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and ELM solutions such as TeamConnect.
“We listen carefully to our clients, identifying and developing tools on our platform that not only help them with present problems, but will inform and shape future best practices,” Mori shared. “Our goal is to offer standardized approaches to perform due diligence and ongoing monitoring of outside counsel and vendors by providing a tool for both sides to collaborate on security, privacy, and business resiliency control assessment questionnaires.”
“We work for the moments our clients breathe out relief and breathe in excitement at discovering what Counself enables them do," explained Mori.
ABOUT COUNSELF
Counself, a highly secure platform, intelligently designed to help corporate counsel and Legal Operations teams manage relationships with their outside counsel and legal vendors. It is a unique two-sided solution that optimizes the RFx process for both clients and vendors. The Counself Risk Module streamlines due diligence collection, review, ranking, and monitoring processes using ready-to-use risk assessment questionnaires, engagement contracts, and other tools. Counself empowers legal departments to beat the maze of evolving financial and regulatory mandates and mitigate risk with external suppliers and enables law firms to respond more efficiently to client requests using best practice templates and iterative collaboration. Counself is under the scope of ISO/IEC 27001 certification, achieved by InfiniGlobe LLC. Visit us to learn more or contact us for a demonstration.