Compliance Driven Product Development: Keeping Your Business and Your Customers Safe
SVLG offers many services, however, a cutting-edge part of our practice involves helping companies develop robots and artificial intelligence systems while mitigating risks in development and launch. Ways to mitigate risks include practical, people-oriented development goals, as well as frontloading expectations and development standards to comply with any relevant laws or regulations that need to be met.
Product Development Best Practices
In creating best development practices, it’s important to be inclusive in your approach. Developing and then marketing and selling a product will most likely end up involving every business unit; with that in mind, you need to make sure to include leaders or representatives from all affected units so that they can drive their divisions towards the common goal. It’s important to have regular meetings to talk about the features of the product and to ensure all the various risks (legal, safety, privacy, etc.) are being considered and mitigated through design, documentation, and implementation. The end feature set must be reflective of this safety-conscious process. In a closely related track, it’s vitally important to have an internal group that serves as a gateway to products being approved for release. Everyone needs to be held accountable to each other in the final release.
Along the way it’s important to have continued assessment of the system; this involves training people in proper procedures, but also to have someone trace the process back to evaluate what was successful and what was not. Whatever the outcome, the result will be an improved process the following time. Part of this training and process needs to be mindful of considering legal topics and issues; if these issues aren’t properly identified, critical safety problems may crop up later. Any safety failing could harm people, which for moral, ethical, and professional reasons is desirable to avoid at all costs. Any kind of harm can, of course, lead to legal action, as well. Obviously, this is not desirable at an individual or company level, and SVLG can assist in ensuring minimum legal risk.
Compliance with Technology Laws
Some legal risks involve regulations; if a company does not comply with applicable laws in some ways, it can be sued by governmental agencies or by private plaintiffs. If a company has a product that's unsafe which then causes accidents, there could be injured parties who sue that company for damages associated with said accidents. There could be people who bought the product that haven't had accidents who will claim, "Well, you sold me the product for “x” but it's only worth ”y” because it's subject to these accidents - so, the difference is my damage." Agencies like the FTC could also go after such a company and file governmental actions against them. In other words, a company could end up having to pay civil money penalties to the government, and they could end up having to settle claims by private plaintiffs. If it's really bad, then a company may not be able to survive.
Delaying mitigation of legal risks means that the company is deciding to roll the dice and to take those risks upon themselves. If they let the problem go and then there's some accident or data breach that occurs, they end up having to spend what could end up being an exorbitant amount of money just to take care of the problem, whereas if they addressed legal risks today, they could have prevented that problem from happening in the first place.
We at SVLG want our clients to avoid problems rather than putting them in a position where they are forced to pay legal fees and defense costs to take care of a problem after it's happened. And, of course, nobody wants to be involved with selling a product that hurts people. You can put yourself in the best possible position to win a legal case that hasn't yet been filed for a product that yet hasn't been developed and sold that might lead to an accident that hasn't yet occurred. You can achieve this protection by going through a process in which you examine the legal risks in the development process of a product or in the procurement process of a product. Mitigate those legal risks today by instituting policies and procedures to make sure that the products are safe. Set your standards to ensure safety, reliability, and security. Then, drive to not just meet your standards but go beyond – continue to improve and streamline your standards. If at some point after you've developed the product and perhaps something goes wrong, you can stand in front of a jury and say, "Not only did we meet the standard of what we're supposed to do, we went above and beyond what we were supposed to do because we wanted to do the right thing."