Exterro CEO Bobby Balachandran recently shared his insights with M. R. Rangaswami of Sandhill.com, a leading resource for the SaaS industry, regarding the strategic shifts driving the emergence of Legal Governance, Risk, and Compliance (Legal GRC).

Balachandran founded Exterro on the belief that the legal sector could significantly benefit from process improvement methodologies used in other industries. Under his leadership, Exterro has built a unified platform designed to help global corporations and government agencies mitigate risk, control costs, and gain end-to-end visibility into their legal operations.

The Expanding Role of Legal Leadership

Bobby highlights that the role of the General Counsel (GC) and Chief Legal Officer (CLO) has fundamentally transformed due to four macro trends:

1. Regulatory Proliferation: A constant stream of new laws requiring strict compliance.
2. Privacy Scrutiny: The rise of high-stakes privacy laws like the GDPR in Europe and the CPRA in California.
3. Cybersecurity Threats: The relentless risk of data breaches and cyber-attacks.
4. The Rise of Legal Operations: Increased pressure from the C-Suite to treat the legal department as an efficient, productive business unit.

The Cross-Departmental Challenge: A Practical Example

Balachandran uses the example of a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) from a former employee to illustrate how modern legal challenges no longer fit into neat organizational "silos":

• The Request: The individual asks to see all data the company holds on them and subsequently requests its deletion.
• The Workflow: The Privacy department cannot handle this alone. They must collaborate with E-Discovery experts to locate, collect, and redact information.
• The Conflict: Before deleting the data, the organization must verify that the information isn't subject to a Legal Hold or specific Regulatory Retention requirements.

"As a result, you have solid or very strongly dotted reporting lines for privacy, compliance, legal operations, litigation support, and even incident response into the GC/CLO. This is forcing a new way to think about how to organize for optimal performance."

The 2026 Legal GRC Solution

As we navigate April 2026, the "solid reporting lines" Bobby spoke about have evolved into a fully integrated Data Risk Management ecosystem.

• Data Intelligence First: The foundation of the Exterro platform is understanding what data exists, where it lives, and who has access to it.
• Unified Response: Whether it is a litigation request, an internal investigation, or a post-breach reporting obligation, the platform treats these as a single, orchestrated business process rather than disconnected fire drills.
• Agentic Oversight: In 2026, the platform utilizes Agentic AI to automatically cross-reference deletion requests against active legal holds, ensuring compliance and defensibility without manual human intervention.

Read the full article on our News page.

As your legal department handles more cross-departmental requests in 2026, are you finding that the traditional boundaries between "IT," "Legal," and "Privacy" are completely disappearing?

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