Compliance patterns: harnessing value modeling and legal interpretation to manage regulatory conversations

Companies must be able to demonstrate that their way of doing business is compliant with relevant rules and regulations. However, the law often has open texture; it is generic and needs to be interpreted before it can be applied in a specific case. Entrepreneurs generally lack the expertise to engage in the regulatory conversations that make up this interpretation process. In particular for the application domain of technological startups, this leads to legal risks. This research seeks to develop a robust module for legal interpretation. We apply informal logic to bridge the gap between the principles of interpretation in legal theory with the legal rules that determine compliance of business processes. Accordingly, interpretive arguments characterized by argument schemes are applied to business models represented by value modeling (VDML). The specific outcome of the argumentation process (if any) is then summarized into a compliance pattern, in a context-problem-solution format. A case study from copyright law, about an internet television company, shows that the approach is able to express the legal arguments of the case, but is also understandable for the target audience.