Legal AI pioneer Scissero and major US law firm Mayer Brown are partnering to provide an integrated issuance solution for structured products. This exclusive deal will combine the former’s AI workflow and document verification tech, with expert input from the firm’s lawyers. (See in-depth AL interview with CEO, Mathias Strasser, below.)
Scissero, which recently brought aboard a large part of the former Robin AI team, (although they are not involved in this deal), told Artificial Lawyer that the initial focus of the collaboration ‘is SEC-registered structured products in the US. The parties expect that the underlying workflow will also be applicable to exempt offerings, European structured products, structured UITs and defined outcome products’.
Scissero is both an AI-enabled legal business and a legal technology company. For the purposes of this collaboration, the US law firm is contracting through Scissero Ltd., the legal technology business, while Mayer Brown is providing the legal services.
Scissero contributes the legal workflow technology and document verification layer that sits between enterprise document automation and the delivery of legal services, they added.
Jon Van Gorp, Mayer Brown’s Chair, commented: ‘We’re pleased to launch this initiative, which we’re confident will benefit financial institutions, and realize many of the benefits of AI in an area in which the firm has a leading practice and has been known as an innovator.’
And now the AL Interview with Scissero CEO, Mathias Strasser:
Why do this, and why now?
Unlike contract review and other areas that dominate the legal AI conversation, structured products automation has received virtually no attention, despite being one of the largest and most operationally intensive legal workflows in global capital markets.
The U.S. structured products market is enormous. According to SPi, Approximately USD 228 billion of structured products were sold in the United States in 2025, with around USD 605 billion outstanding as of the end of July 2026. For some issuers, structured products account for as much as half of their balance sheet alongside customer deposits.
Much of the issuance process has already been automated. But one critical part hasn’t.
Issuers of SEC-registered structured products spend more than USD 100 million a year on legal fees – it’s a massive market. The legal review of transaction documentation is not only a significant cost factor, it’s also one of the principal bottlenecks in the issuance process.
As a result, the U.S. has lagged behind Europe in achieving true straight-through processing. Per-trade notionals remain higher, products are more expensive to issue and the range of available payoff structures is more limited.
This is because the U.S. is a highly litigious market, and banks consider thorough legal review of offering documentation to be critical. Even where documents are generated by sophisticated automation platforms (such as WallStreetDocs), lawyers still need confidence that the output is legally correct. To them, the document automation platform often remains a black box.
That’s where Scissero comes in. Building on WSD’s next-generation agentic document automation platform, our AI-enabled document verification technology gives Mayer Brown greater confidence in system-generated documentation, enabling its lawyers to review documents more efficiently while maintaining appropriate legal oversight. The result is a faster, lower-cost issuance process with all the benefits that this entails.
Is this primarily an AI-driven product, or something else?
It’s a legal workflow platform with a significant AI component.
AI is used in two principal ways. First, it helps verify the document automation logic itself, identifying weaknesses and validating that the automation behaves as intended. Secondly, it verifies the documentation produced by that automation.
The verification process combines deterministic validation with AI-based analysis, all underpinned by substantial domain expertise.
I’ve worked in and around the structured products industry for almost thirty years, and several members of our team likewise have decades of experience in structured products, legal practice and document automation. That expertise is fundamental to how we design our workflows, determine what should be verified and how, and decide where AI is appropriate and where deterministic validation provides greater assurance.
How did this come about? How did you meet?
Bringing straight-through processing to the U.S. structured products market was the vision with which I founded WSD back in 2009. At the time, I genuinely thought it would take about a year to get there. Little did I know.
Seventeen years later, WSD automates almost every other aspect of the structured products lifecycle, yet the legal review process has remained stubbornly resistant to full automation.
Over those seventeen years, I tried just about every possible approach to solving that problem, including tackling this market with Scissero alone. Eventually, I realised that a startup law firm was never going to be onboarded by Tier 1 investment banks in one of the most risk-sensitive areas of their business. Carta and Norm wouldn’t be able to get onboarded either. So the better solution was to separate the legal technology from the legal services and partner with a global law firm like Mayer Brown that’s active in this space and already onboarded everywhere.
And that’s exactly what this collaboration does. Scissero provides the legal workflow platform and document verification technology. Mayer Brown provides the legal services. Together, we have all the pieces required to deliver true straight-through processing.
I’ve known Anna Pinedo for well over fifteen years, and we’ve discussed these issues on and off throughout that time. She’s always struck me as one of the most forward-thinking lawyers I’ve met, and it’s very satisfying to finally see this idea come together.
Does this involve the Robin AI team?
No. At Scissero, we have a private funds team, which includes Robin AI, and a capital markets team. This initiative is being led by Scissero’s capital markets team.
That said, the Robin AI team has now been fully integrated into Scissero, and the combined team is now using a very cool (we belive, market-leading) AI-agent-powered contract review platform.
We’ll also be making another major announcement over the next few weeks involving our combined Scissero/Robin AI private funds team.
Will you do this with other law firms?
Our collaboration with Mayer Brown in the structured products space is exclusive.
It’s a strategic collaboration that combines Scisserero’s legal technology with Mayer Brown’s legal services in a way that can be adopted by Tier 1 investment banks. While the structured products-specific collaboration is exclusive, we believe the model has broader potential and we may pursue similar collaborations in other practice areas where doing so creates value for us and our clients.
That said, I want to be clear that this isn’t our only model. In many areas, where onboarding is less of an issue, Scissero provides legal services directly to clients. But in certain highly specialised and institutionally sensitive markets, combining specialist legal technology with the expertise and client relationships of a leading global law firm can be the fastest and most effective way to bring innovation to market.
And, what is your view on growing token costs?
What growing token costs? 😉 We have DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, Qwen and half of them can be run not only on OpenRouter but on your own hardware. The pace at which the OSS models are developing makes it almsot a foregone conclusion at this point that we’ll reach parity before the end of the year (GLM 5.5 has been promised for August, Qwen 4 for September). Competition is healthy everywhere – in the structured products legal services market and in the market for foundational AI models. I think the next six months are going to be incredibly exciting.
Thanks and congratulations.
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Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November
Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators!
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
After another fantastic Legal Innovators California, where we had speakers from OpenAI, Y Combinator, Google, Meta, and many more pioneering organisations; and our stellar inaugural event in Paris this June, we are now looking forward to the landmark conferences in London and New York, both in November, and both across two days: Law Firm Day, and Inhouse Day.
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