Legal Accountability as Software Quality: A US Data Processing Perspective

Software and hardware innovation has led to new consumer products and services with significant benefits to consumers and society. These advances, however, can come with great cost to society when they fail to comply with government laws and regulations. While compliance failures do result from technical missteps in design, there is also a wide gap between the technical expertise and culture of legal analysts and software engineers, as well as competing priorities between legal requirements and business objectives. In this perspective paper, we propose changing legal compliance from a corporate oversight activity to a principal design activity, wherein lawyers and software engineers employ enhanced methods and tools tailored to bridge the cultural and knowledge gap and assess legal and business trade-offs. To that end, we describe a new software quality, called Legal Accountability, which can be evaluated alongside other qualities, such as usability, modifiability, performance and testing. Legal Accountability has five properties that lawyers and designers must attend to, including legal traceability, completeness, validity, auditability and continuity. We illustrate the quality with examples from the U.S. data processing perspective, and prior work in requirements engineering, before concluding with future and ongoing research challenges.