Compliance management has become a significant burden for in-house legal teams, consuming valuable time and resources that could be spent on strategic legal work. Openli’s Trust Report—based on a survey of legal professionals—reveals the growing pressures around GDPR, vendor compliance, and audits, shedding light on how legal teams are struggling to keep up.
The findings indicate that manual processes, inefficient vendor management, and increasing regulatory demands are creating unnecessary stress and reducing productivity. However, automation and the right tools can help mitigate these challenges. Let’s dive into the key takeaways.
Maintaining compliance documentation, responding to inquiries, and managing vendor compliance are all-consuming tasks. The report found that:
The bottom line? A full workweek every month is lost to compliance-related tasks, making it difficult for legal teams to focus on contract negotiations, risk assessments, or strategic counsel.
Vendor compliance remains a major challenge for in-house legal teams, requiring constant monitoring, assessment, and updates. Most teams still lack a centralized solution, leading to inefficiencies.
✔️ 76% of legal teams use spreadsheets, emails, or shared documents for compliance tracking, making it prone to errors.
✔️ 52% of respondents experience frequent delays from vendors, with some waiting 1-2 weeks for compliance-related responses.
✔️ 43% report compliance tasks are delayed due to a lack of internal resources.
✔️ Onboarding a new vendor and completing compliance checks takes 2-4 weeks on average.
With companies often dealing with 100+ vendors, each requiring compliance checks and ongoing monitoring, the manual approach is simply unsustainable.
Many legal teams still rely on outdated, manual processes like spreadsheets and email threads to track compliance, leading to inefficiencies, missed updates, and additional stress.
✔️ 50% of legal teams still manually track compliance, significantly increasing workload.
✔️ Legal professionals who rely on manual processes spend 2-3x longer on compliance tasks than those using automated solutions.
✔️ 70% of respondents believe automating vendor compliance would free up significant time for more strategic work.
Additionally, many professionals highlighted that generating audit reports manually is one of their biggest challenges, creating unnecessary delays and stress.
Without efficient systems in place, audits and regulatory checks become a nightmare for legal teams. Missing documentation, outdated compliance records, and last-minute scrambling are all too common.
For companies dealing with complex privacy regulations like GDPR, ensuring up-to-date compliance documentation can make the difference between a smooth audit and a compliance disaster.
One of the most striking findings of the report is how much compliance work distracts legal teams from their core responsibilities. Instead of handling high-value legal matters, they are stuck in a cycle of document collection, vendor assessments, and compliance tracking.
✔️ 67% of respondents say that vendor compliance tasks prevent them from focusing on other legal priorities.
✔️ The most time-consuming compliance tasks include:
For businesses looking to optimize their legal operations, finding a way to reduce the compliance burden is critical.
The Trust Report highlights a clear trend: legal teams need better tools to streamline compliance. Companies that have adopted platforms like Openli’s Privacy Hub report significant improvements:
✔️ 80% of Openli users say the platform has significantly reduced their compliance workload.
✔️ 75% of Openli users find audits and regulatory checks far less stressful thanks to automation.
✔️ Openli users spend less than half the time on compliance-related tasks compared to non-users.
By implementing automated compliance solutions, organizations can:
The growing complexity of privacy laws and vendor compliance requirements is putting significant pressure on in-house legal teams. Manual tracking and outdated processes are no longer sustainable, and organizations that fail to adapt risk falling behind, increasing compliance risks, and wasting valuable resources.
Investing in automation and structured compliance tracking is no longer just an option—it’s a necessity. Platforms like Openli are proving that with the right tools, compliance can become a streamlined, stress-free process, allowing legal teams to focus on what truly matters.
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