You probably have not heard of JDX Consulting. But, it’s a multi-service Alternative Legal Service Provider (ALSP) that works with legal AI company Seal Software, operating at the heart of the global financial system, conducting work for some of the world’s largest banks, among others.
Artificial Lawyer spoke to Charles Post, head of US consulting services, and Steven Crotch, head of marketing for consulting services, about what the company’s new AI division actually does and where it’s headed.
Crotch began by explaining JDX’s evolution from a provider of flexible resourcing for derivatives operations, to a full service financial services consulting and advisory firm, with operational and managed services, led by a pool of industry practitioners that have found their way to JDX this past year, from names like Barclays, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Accenture, and BNY Mellon.
JDX is now carving out their own niche through their ability to train, tune, and finesse AI models in Seal Software, addressing complex financial document analysis and review tasks such as those that cover LIBOR/IBOR, procurement and derivatives.
‘We have a differentiator, an eclectic group of industry practitioners. While in terms of AI and contract analytics, we are forming our own practice, which we are building around Seal,’ Post told this site.
Post explained how their team builds and deploys AI models utilising an agile methodology, tailoring them to the idiosyncrasies of each organisation that needs them. I.e. they train up the NLP software to provide accurate results for what are very complex financial services contracts.
In effect what JDX does is fill the gap between the AI software supplier and the legal teams that may end up having to do a massive and very complex review of thousands of documents, such as a global bank.
But, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Knowing where your documents are is the start of all things, Post explained. You can’t get into all that unstructured data until you know where those documents are in the organisation and at a high level what they are about.
‘We build an indicative document map, as organisations have had disparate and organic forms of contract management practices over many years. We show how many, where they are, and then the region; type; stakeholder; end user; and related volumes. We build an entire map,’ he explained.
That then gets ingested into Seal – which incidentally was just bought by DocuSign (see story).
As Post continued, this is more than just shunting docs around to reach greater insights, it’s trying to ‘create actionable, decision-ready legal data’.
‘It’s a data-driven operating model. And it goes beyond contracts. You can then leverage this for middle office document automation or for replacing manual data entry,’ he added.
In short, once JDX – with some help from Seal’s core software – has set to work on your docs, it will leave you not just with a single event-driven project completed, but potentially move your KM and business intelligence position to a new level.
All well and good. But, what next for JDX?
Crotch and Post explained that they are building a distributed ledger advisory (DLT) practice and separately a predictive analytics practice.
And the company itself?
JDX the company is about 700 people now, with offices in six locations, with hubs in Dublin, London, New York and Singapore.
Post stressed that amid all this expansion: ‘No one is paying for our learning curve, we are priced competitively, we are on-shore, operate in your time, and we are solving contract transparency.’
From his point of view JDX is operating in a market quadrant that is fairly unique. Although there are and have been other companies that work with legal AI companies to help train up the NLP for specific analysis tasks. For example Cenza does this at present, and prior to its merger with Seal, Apogee Legal under the leadership of Jim Wagner, also trained up NLP software to create modules for Seal and its clients.
That said, JDX’s mix of services and its position at the very top end of the financial services sector does indeed put it in a rare position in the market.
Overall then, JDX’s AI Practice is an unusual type of business, but one that is at the heart of the legal and contract review space, without either providing legal advice or being an ‘AI company’ itself.