Mitratech is a global technology leader empowering corporate legal, risk and compliance, and HR professionals to maximize productivity, control expense, and mitigate risk by deepening operational alignment and increasing collaboration and visibility across their organization. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Mitratech’s Executive Director of GRC Solutions, Alastair Parr, to learn more about the company.
Alastair Parr’s Background
Can you tell us about your professional background? Parr said:
“I bring over 15 years of experience in product management, consultancy, and operations. I ensure that customer and market demands are thoughtfully integrated and applied innovatively within the Mitratech solution portfolio. My background is in governance, risk, and compliance, where I’ve developed and implemented solutions to address the increasingly complex challenges in risk management.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Parr explained:
“Mitratech’s Governance, Risk and Compliance suite offers end-to-end, top-to-bottom risk and compliance management capabilities, spanning:
— Policy Management & Internal Controls
— EUC & Model Risk Management (MRM)
— Vendor & Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)
— Cyber & IT Risk Management
— QHSE & Incident Management
— Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery
— Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG)
— Ethics Hotlines, Curriculum, & Reporting
Whether organizations are just starting to implement GRC processes or looking to deploy next-generation programs across their full enterprise, Mitratech simplifies the process with cross-industry applications, convenient out-of-the-box templates, and relevant analytics to empower data-driven business outcomes. Mitratech also offers a full suite of Corporate Legal and HR Compliance offerings.”
ESG Monitoring Feature
With ESG compliance becoming a growing priority for regulators and investors, how does Mitratech’s new ESG monitoring feature help companies uphold sustainability standards throughout their supply chains? Parr emphasized:
“Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, such as measuring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, have surely emerged as a key priority among companies, investors, and government regulators. Measuring GHG emissions involves focusing on direct emissions and extending attention to indirect emissions throughout the supply chain, where scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions come into play. As more governments legislate ESG and sustainability regulations, companies must sift through mountains of ESG reporting data to meet supply chain compliance requirements.
The Mitratech solution includes new capabilities that enhance ESG and sustainability monitoring and correlate with the results of questionnaire-based ESG risk assessments to standardize and simplify global ESG compliance reporting across your supply chain.
The latest release includes:
— Globally sourced, standards-based data from a recognized leader in ESG and sustainability reporting.
— Advanced sustainability ratings and scores, including scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and equivalent value in cash (EVIC) intensity, for each supplier to compare over time and against industry averages.
— Analyst-curated emissions scores, negative news, and controversies to deliver visibility on potential reputational concerns.
— A comprehensive library of global sustainability questionnaires with built-in remediation guidance to benchmark reporting.
— A centralized risk register of assessment results and sustainability data for investigation, triage, and task and event management.
By comprehensively understanding and managing Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, companies can mitigate supply chain and reputational risks, meet stakeholder expectations, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge.”
Designing New Risk Management Tools
In light of this year’s high-profile supply chain incidents, what insights did Mitratech apply in designing these new risk management tools? Parr replied:
“Our annual TPRM study showed that 61% of companies reported a third-party breach in 2023 – up nearly 50% in the last year and 3x since 2021. Due to growing supplier populations (often global), organizations are often unable to consistently visualize where their data goes and where proprietary or sensitive data can easily be shared with suppliers and subcontractors. What’s more, third-party breaches are among the most expensive for organizations to recover from. Data from the 2024 IBM/Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach Report shows that third-party breaches are the third highest predictor of increased breach costs, increasing costs by 5% above the average.
The latest enhancements are meant to address growing supplier complexity by:
— Quickly identifying vendors potentially at risk of a software supply chain disruption, reducing risk and speeding up the resolution process.
— Reducing the time required to analyze the impact of supply chain events.
— Improving supply chain risk visibility and saving time by providing one-stop access to thousands of ESG scores, intelligence and controversies fully aligned with other enterprise risks.
— Reducing the time required to populate new assessments, speeding risk analysis and remediation.”
Insights About ESG Scores For Suppliers
Sustainability and ESG have emerged as essential metrics for evaluating vendor relationships. Could you provide insights into the specific ESG criteria Mitratech’s platform leverages to assess and score suppliers? Parr noted:
“The Mitratech solution provides insights into several ESG metrics.
— Globally sourced, standards-based data from a recognized leader in ESG and sustainability reporting.
— Advanced sustainability ratings and scores, including scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and equivalent value in cash (EVIC) intensity, for each supplier to compare over time and against industry averages.
— Analyst-curated emissions scores, negative news and controversies to deliver visibility on potential reputational concerns.
Data is presented over time, and with it users can compare suppliers against:
— Industry averages
— Their peers
— Other suppliers in the same region
With the solution, procurement and supply chain teams can improve supply chain visibility and consistency and save time by providing one-stop access to thousands of ESG scores, intelligence, and controversies, fully aligned with other enterprise risks.”
Evolution Of Mitratech’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Parr replied:
“We first introduced our ESG capabilities in 2020 and have since added deeper Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions tracking, overall ESG score enrichment, and ESG controversy tracking to our library of ESG questionnaires, enabling organizations to keep pace with the ever-changing ESG regulatory landscape. As supply chains grow and become more complex, it’s essential that organizations centrally track all of their supply chain risks – from cyber disruptions to operational, ESG, and reputational challenges. Our view is that our solution should become the single source of truth for all third-party vendor and supplier risks, which feeds into the overall GRC solution to manage enterprise risks.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Parr cited:
“Mitratech has achieved several significant milestones over its 30+ years of operation delivering legal, risk management, and compliance technology.”
“Perhaps most impressive is the expansion of our global reach — we now serve over 20,000 clients globally, and support more than 500,000 users across 160 countries.”
“We also recently announced some exciting Generative AI enhancements and platform developments across our portfolio, which aim to elevate:
— Process Optimization: Key developments in Document Summarization and Extraction cut the time of lengthy invoice review and guide better responses, while Automated Classification and Mapping connect critical risk data with AI-powered taxonomy and ontology mapping. Future deployments of Mitratech ARIES™, our AI-powered digital assistant and chat interface, will further streamline process enhancements, flagging roadblocks and directing employees to the correct workflow or business resource automatically.
— Risk Control: Cutting-edge AI capabilities were recently rolled out for automated risk assessments, including importing PDF documents (like SOC2, ISO27001 SoA, and Policy sets), AI-powered digital assistance that can take actions and summarize information, and the ability to auto-populate risk surveys based on previous responses from other systems. These join a range of AI investments within our enterprise risk management platform in 2024, including new Smart Widgets, Generative AI-Based Evidence Summarization, Sentiment Analysis,
— Cross-Functional Collaboration and Data Analysis: Advancements in PlatoBI, our unified analytics repository developed in partnership with Snowflake and AWS, continue to enable intra- and cross-product analysis spanning the Mitratech portfolio. Taking it one step further, Mitratech HQ serves as the gateway to access unified data from PlatoBI via single sign-on, a centralized dashboard, and other collaborative features. This means customers get an entire view of their Mitratech data, solutions, and reports — all from one headquarters.”
Other recent platform developments across our portfolio include:
— The recent debut of Mitratech CaseCloud, a powerful new case and spend management solution tailored for law firms and the public sector.
—The release of TeamConnect 7.2, introducing a wide-ranging set of new features and enhancements like an expanded set of REST APIs, a new, modernized Outlook 365 Add-In, security report generation, bulk timekeeper request actions, and more.
— The Workflow Solution Gallery in the Mitratech TAP Designer, making it easier than ever to import pre-built workflow templates designed to help automate key processes (like NDAs, Legal Services Requests, and Conflicts of Interest) with minimal effort.
— The release of LegalHold 3.6, introducing expanded legal hold capabilities like enhanced reporting, improved M365 integration, additional compliance notifications, and more.
Standout awards and recognitions for Mitratech include:
— Our fourth year of recognition in the QKS SPARK Matrix with its highest ranking yet
— Our fourth consecutive recognition by LegalTech Breakthrough
— Our “Highest Rated ELM and Best Overall for Enterprise” highlight from LegalTech TAM Awards
— A first-time mention in Hyperion Research’s MarketView Report for low-code/no-code workflow automation.
— 2 Anthem Awards for excellence in compliance training
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Parr affirmed:
“Mitratech is truly developing the industry’s most unified, interconnected portfolio of legal, risk, and HR compliance solutions.”
“We’re connecting data that powers AI and Analytics to the industry’s largest compliance ecosystem, driving smarter automation and collaboration – all while putting accuracy, ethics, and our customers at the center of everything we do.”
“Our platform approach harnesses the power of data insights and AI, unified design, integrations, and security tools to deliver unprecedented customer value through capabilities like interactive guidance and insights, predictive recommendations, automated document and policy creation and review, and more.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Parr concluded:
“Our goal is for the Mitratech solution to become the single source of truth for all third-party vendor and supplier risks, which then feeds into our larger GRC platform to help teams holistically manage enterprise risk. This is increasingly important as supply chains grow and become increasingly more complex — we want to serve as that single partner, helping organizations centrally track all of their supply chain risks, from cyber disruptions to operational, ESG, reputational, and compliance challenges.”
“Year after year, Mitratech has also been recognized as a technology leader for integrating advanced Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing into our legal, risk, and HR solutions. With our vision of a true platform approach, the goal for our AI and platform strategy moves beyond analyzing data in silos — it works across all solutions, uncovering trends, predicting risks, and recommending actions based on data from a variety of sources.”
“As Mike Williams, our CEO, puts it: ‘The roles of legal, risk, and HR professionals are becoming increasingly interconnected as they navigate shared challenges across compliance, data privacy, and workforce management. This convergence calls for collaborative solutions that empower teams to manage risk and drive real-time resilience across disciplines. While AI is not new to Mitratech, what’s new is how we’re connecting it with the industry’s largest compliance ecosystem, driving smarter automation, faster results, and increased transparency — all while leading with accuracy, ethics, and a unified customer experience.’”
“As we continue to build and deliver on the market’s most interconnected risk and compliance platform, I think this larger vision both fuels our drive to keep innovating and reaffirms our commitment to helping our clients meet today’s toughest compliance challenges with unmatched value and resilience.”
