Compliance, Decoded

The contracts nobody reads are the ones that hurt you most.

A new client sends over their standard service agreement. Twelve pages, a familiar template, nothing jumps out, so you sign it. Eighteen months later, something goes wrong, and you discover that on page nine you agreed to unlimited liability, and the work your team built now belongs to someone else.

In Episode 5 of Compliance Decoded, David Rieger is joined by Alexander Kirchmauer, Co-Founder of Pactavo and a former lawyer and legal counsel. Alexander has read these agreements professionally and signed them as a founder, and he breaks down the contracts every business gets wrong.

In this episode:

• The everyday contracts businesses treat as boilerplate, and why we stop reading them
• What liability, indemnity, IP ownership and termination clauses actually do
• How to push back on a bad clause, even when the other side is a much bigger player
• The three things to check before you sign anything
• When you can handle it yourself, and when you really need a lawyer
• What to do if you’ve already signed something you’re uneasy about

Compliance Decoded cuts through the noise and tells you what actually matters in security, compliance and digital law.

Everyone wants compliance and security. No one wants to own it.

In Episode 3 of Compliance Decoded, David Rieger talks with Christian Pichler, [title, company], about the ownership problem at the heart of compliance. Why do companies spend months building a product, only to find dozens of things missing at the end? And why does no one want to be responsible for the delay?

In this episode:

• Why compliance and security keep getting pushed to the end of development
• The “no one owns it” problem, and why every company needs one clear owner
• How responsibility works across different levels of an organisation
• How compliance requirements slow products down, and how to plan for them early

Your company decides to pursue ISO 27001 — the goal is to prove a strong security posture to customers and partners. You open the standard, read the first few pages, and the overwhelm hits. Where do you even start? What actually matters first?

In this episode, host David Rieger sits down with Aron Lange — founder of GRC Lab and an ISO 27001 Lead Auditor who has trained more than ten thousand people on exactly this — to strip away the overwhelm. What the standard really asks of you, the implementation steps that actually matter, and what an auditor is genuinely looking for in the room.

If ISO 27001 has ever felt like a maze, this is your map.

Compliance, Decoded — cutting through the noise on security, compliance, and digital law.

Your team has quietly started using AI to draft, summarise, and research. It's saving real time — until you read about a lawyer who filed a brief citing cases an AI completely invented, and the questions start. What are people feeding into these tools? What happens to confidentiality? And if the AI gets it wrong, who's on the hook?

In this episode, host David Rieger sits down with Dr. David Schneeberger — a lawyer who guides law firms, authorities, and legal departments through actually adopting AI, not the hype — to separate signal from noise. Where AI genuinely changes legal work, where professional duties draw hard limits, and how to adopt it responsibly. Tool, threat, or both?

Compliance, Decoded — cutting through the noise on security, compliance, and digital law.