A Legal Perspective on Business: Modeling the Impact of Law

Abstract. Modern goal-oriented requirements engineering frameworks use modeling as a means of better understanding a domain, leading to an overall improvement in the quality of the requirements. Regulations and laws impose additional context and constraints on software goals and can limit the satisfaction of stakeholder needs. Organizations and software developers need to have the modeling tools they need to properly address the potential deep impact legal issues can have on the effectiveness of business strategies. In this paper, we perform a preliminary study into the development of a modeling framework able to support the analysis of legal prescriptions alongside the business strategies. We demonstrate, via a case study involving the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), how models of this law can be built with the GRL modeling language and how they can be evaluated as part of the business goal models.