1. Spot the Problem

What everyone sees.

An endless, bottomless pit of laws and requirements that you have to comply with and no single central source of information. No matter the industry or the jurisdiction every business has a list of requirements that they just have to follow, regardless if the rules make sense or not. The worst part of this is not trying to prove that you're doing the best you can to ensure you're in line with the law. The worst part is not even being aware of what you laws apply to you. How often are they updated? Where are the updated published? How can you get notified and filter the useless noise. What happens instead? If we're lucky, we follow the so called 'flagship' laws. The ones that are most advertised about. The ones that are most talked about. Not necessarily the ones that are most important. Mind you, they're all important. Some are just more critical than others.

2. Find the Root

What's actually happening.

The EU alone is one of the most regulated areas of the world. Laws and requirements are written, developed and published faster than we can adopt them. It's normal, kind of expected (sort of) the world changes and evolves, and rules must change and evolve with it. There's a supervisory authority (the big dogs in charge of enforcement) for each and every single "category" of law out there. The EDPB for GDPR, the EBA for DORA, etc. Each of them only cares about their domain, their topic-specific content.

Worse yet, whenever a law is proposed, drafted and published, we only hear about (if we hear about it) the very last minute. Often time we only hear about the ones that got picked up by some big advisory firm who has the budget to advertise about it and win early clients. Great! But what about all the other requirements that we never hear about?

3. Make It Click

Here's what to do instead.

I've tried countless tools to help me centralise (as best as I could) the information out there. Most cost money (and quite a lot too) and still don't really solve the problem. Over and above the fact that almost each of these tools has a steep learning curve, taking away precious time from just learning the new rules. Who has time to learn a tool that's job is for you to learn a rule?! Madness. Over the years, I've rediscovered my love for simplicity. (I used to fall for the shiny object syndrome). Here's what I do (just 2 things): I set up Google Alerts to receive notifications straight to my inbox about each specific criteria or filter I set it up for; and I pull RSS feeds from the important sources into an RSS reader. Both completely free, without any catch. Most RSS readers are only free until you've reach 100 sources. 100 SOURCES! There are thousands of laws, I'll grant you that, but there aren't thousands of sources. It will be quite a while before you've reached the max. And if you have...congrats, you love reading laws a hell of a lot more than I do.

Root Test

A quick challenge: If all your legal updates stopped arriving today, how long would it take before you realised you'd missed something important?

Try This Week

One tiny action: Choose your three most important regulators or supervisory authorities and subscribe to their updates. Either through an RSS feed or a Google Alert. It takes less than 15 minutes and creates a simple early-warning system that works in the background.

Root Reading

Two recommendations: Feedly and Inoreader for your RSS Feeds.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with these brands, I recommend them from my experience and for your benefit.

If this changed how you think, share it with one person who'd appreciate it too. 🙂

The root is always the problem.
The solution is a simple click.
- Dre

What problem should I tackle next? I read to all feedback so reply to this email and I'll help out!

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Root Click

The More You Search The Less You Find