Topic: Liability

Cyber incidents are driving data breach, supply chain and mass claims in the UK, prompting organisations to reassess cyber risk and liability.

The UKJT examines how English tort law can address AI-related harms and outlines practical steps businesses can take to manage risk.

We discuss how different regulatory frameworks for driverless cars across the UK, US and Australia are extending to manufacturers, operators and software providers.

In this post, we cover Winters v. OpenAI, Inc. et al., a San Francisco Superior Court lawsuit filed by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old Florida pastor who claims that responses from ChatGPT-4o contributed to a near-fatal pulmonary embolism.

The CJEU’s forthcoming decision on so called “long arm jurisdiction”, under which courts have assumed jurisdiction beyond the limits of strictly national or contractually defined territories could enable far-reaching centralisation of patent litigation in the EU, turning authorised representatives into jurisdictional anchors and significantly increasing procedural and liability risks for global market participants.

Relief events clauses are included as standard provisions of most technology implementation, outsourcing and services contracts. Under such provisions, the supplier is relieved of its obligations if or to the extent that its failure to comply with contractual requirements is caused by the customer.

Liability is often a contentious topic (and typically the last provision to be agreed) in a technology or outsourcing contract negotiation.

The financial services sector is becoming increasingly reliant on cloud service providers (CSPs) to fulfil its growing data processing and storage needs. Financial services providers in the United States have reportedly had the highest levels of adoption, operating 54 percent of their workloads in the cloud; and according to the European Central Bank, banks spent 13.5 percent more on cloud outsourcing in 2024 than in 2023.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) is currently consulting on its draft guidelines on the sound management of third party risk (Draft Guidelines), which are intended to replace the 2019 guidelines on outsourcing arrangements (2019 Guidelines).

Financial regulators globally emphasise the importance of financial entities being operationally resilient, which includes the ability to manage and recover from disruptions caused by their service providers. The topic receives significant attention in the financial services sector because the sector is regulated, with the aim of promoting financial system stability.