Product & Platform Structuring

As early as possible. The most expensive legal problems in technology businesses are the ones that get baked into the product before anyone considers the legal implications. Data collection practices, content moderation approaches, IP ownership structures, third-party dependencies, and regulatory positioning are all harder and more expensive to fix after launch than to design correctly from the outset. We work with product teams during the design and development phase to identify legal risks and build compliance into the product architecture.

At a minimum, you need terms of service, a privacy policy, and a cookie consent mechanism. Depending on your platform, you may also need community guidelines, content moderation policies, a grievance redressal mechanism with a designated officer, seller or vendor terms, creator or contributor agreements, an acceptable use policy, and age verification mechanisms if your product is accessible to minors. If you process payments, additional terms and PCI compliance are required. If you operate in regulated sectors, sector-specific disclosures and licences may be needed. We help platforms build the full document stack tailored to their specific business model.

The practical approach is to identify the most demanding regulatory requirements you will face (typically the EU for data and AI, India for intermediary obligations and data localisation, the US for sector-specific rules) and build your compliance architecture to meet those requirements as a baseline. This avoids maintaining separate compliance systems for each market. The key areas to address are data flows and storage (where data is processed and whether localisation applies), content moderation (different jurisdictions have different takedown timelines), user rights (data subject rights, consumer rights), and disclosure obligations. We advise on structuring operations so that a single compliance framework serves multiple markets with minimal jurisdiction-specific customisation.

Third-party integrations create legal dependencies. Key considerations include the API terms of service (which may restrict how you use the service, limit liability, and allow the provider to change terms or discontinue the API), data sharing and processing obligations (if user data flows to the third party), IP ownership of outputs generated using the API, uptime and service level commitments (or lack thereof), and compliance pass-through (whether the third party’s regulatory compliance covers your use case). We advise on reviewing API terms, structuring integration agreements, and ensuring that third-party dependencies do not create unmanageable legal or operational risk.