Legal AI Co. Seal Launches Financial Services NLP Suite

Legal AI company Seal Software has released a comprehensive suite of financial sector review and extraction tools aimed at banks and financial services firms. It includes NLP applications related to LIBOR, derivatives, and M&A deals, among other things.

The Seal Financial Services Suite is made from multiple collections of pre-built analytics that are using NLP to identify and extract key information in certain types of documents, i.e. users should in theory be able to gain significant insights ‘out of the box’.

This approach is possible in part due to the merger with NLP specialists, Apogee Legal, earlier this year, which has focused on investing huge amounts of time in training up NLP packages for very specific use cases and particular types of document so that clients don’t have to do so much ‘on the job’ training themselves.

Unlike nearly all other legal AI companies, Seal has from day one had a focus on serving corporates, rather than law firms. And, it’s fair to say this strategy has worked and allowed it grow considerably in recent years. The new suite of tools looks set to expand upon this strategy.

Details of the NLP packages being offered to financial services clients include:

  • Procurement Insight – Detailed procurement-related analytics regarding contract compliance and third-party risk (OCC 2013-29 and similar)
  • LIBOR Insight – Detailed analytics to identify the existence and use of LIBOR and LIBOR-related interest calculations in credit and trading relationships
  • QFC Insight – Detailed analytics to support SR-14 compliance for qualified financial documents such as ISDA master agreements
  • Brexit Insight  – Detailed analytics to identify and surface key clauses for determining Brexit readiness, exposure and need for renegotiation or re-papering
  • GDPR Data Privacy Insight  – Detailed analytics to identify GDPR compliance and readiness within contracts such as data breach notifications and access rights
  • NDA Insight – Detailed analytics to identify key clauses and risks in strategic non-disclosure agreements
  • M&A Insight – Detailed analytics to surface key terms for due diligence, divestiture and post-merger integration projects

Commenting on the move, Ulf Zetterberg, CEO and co-founder at Seal, said: ‘The financial services sector is subject to more unique and stringent regulatory and reporting requirements than any other industry.’

‘The Seal Financial Services Suite is a direct reflection of our deep industry expertise and nearly a decade of using artificial intelligence to deliver the detailed information that our financial services clients require across their contract portfolios,’ he added.

Seal’s financial services practice is led by two senior lawyers: Stuart Brock and Lynn Sumlin.

Brock concluded: ‘Banks spend some $270 billion each year on compliance. Traditional risk assessments are conducted by large teams of people manually scouring tens of thousands, and often hundreds of thousands, of business agreements. [This AI technology] can help do the job in a fraction of the time and at much lower cost, allowing banks to meet their regulatory and other risk obligations while controlling costs.’