The Legal Register
Process Template

KNOWING IS ONE THING.
KEEPING TRACK IS ANOTHER.

Our last post highlighted a practical reality of running a business: laws and regulations continue to evolve and change, whether your business is paying attention to them or not. With obligations spanning employment, health and safety, data protection, environmental regulation and many other areas, it is surprisingly easy for something to be missed.

Advisers and trade bodies may help keep you informed, but their focus will inevitably be limited by the scope of their role or sector. As a business owner, your responsibilities are much wider. Ultimately, responsibility for compliance sits with you as a business owner or director.

Rather than relying on memory, occasional conversations, an assumption that your advisers have it covered or someone else spotting a change, a better approach is to embed a process within the business for managing your responsibilities. A legal register is one way to do this. It provides a structured record of the legislation and regulations that apply to your business, who is responsible for them and how compliance is evidenced. Reviewed at least annually – and updated when circumstances or legislation change – it becomes part of the way the business manages compliance and demonstrates that it is doing so.

To make that easier to implement, we've created a practical Excel-based process, already populated with a substantial list of laws and regulations. You can download it, adapt it for your own business and avoid having to build the process from scratch.

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