How Elevate Worked With Clifford Chance On Its LIBOR Project

In this special AL TV video we look at how law company Elevate worked with global law firm Clifford Chance on its LIBOR transition project, which involved the review – often with NLP – of thousands of documents, flagging issues in those contracts, and then dealing with remediation.

The AL TV Product Exploration features Dan Katz, VP, Data Science & Innovation at Elevate and who is also a Law Professor at Chicago Kent College of Law, and Anthony Vigneron, Director, Legal Technology Solutions, at Clifford Chance.

In the video we explore what the problem was that they wanted to solve, how Elevate’s approach to providing an extensible and customisable solution was central to this project, and what have been the outcomes.

We also consider the importance of taking a data science approach to solving this kind of challenge in the legal world. Press play to watch inside the page.

AL TV Productions, 2022.

Commenting on the LIBOR work that Clifford Chance has done, partner Jeremy Walter, who led on the service offering, said: ‘IBOR transition is arguably the biggest document transition project the financial services sector has ever undertaken. It requires detailed, technical legal knowledge to identify and modify the interest rate basis across an large range of diverse product types, coupled with a delivery solution capable of handling the massive volumes of affected transactions and documents in an efficient way.

‘At Clifford Chance we brought our market leading expertise on the technical, legal side together with our legal technology team to develop enhanced technology tools that really make the difference when it comes to the implementation aspect.’

Carissa Schiller, from Clifford Chance’s Legal Technology team, added: ‘IBOR required us to think differently about the technologies needed and how we set it up. The variation in document types, templates and client requirements meant that we needed a flexible, modular solution rather than a rigid approach.

‘We made use of multiple smart technologies, while maintaining a single workflow and reporting platform for our clients. I worked closely with our data science team to design text extraction models that we can adjust to client requirements, accelerating both our setup and review time.’

Note: LIBOR is the London Interbank Offered Rate. It is a variable interest rate which is used in many financial instruments. There was a scandal some years ago involving the manipulation of this rate. As a result, the rate is going to be sunset. However, given there are still many contracts tied to this rate they need to be either repapered / renegotiated. IBOR stands for Interbank Offered Rate.

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