(Ebook) Legal data for banking : business optimisation and regulatory compliance by Akber Datoo ISBN 9781119357162, 9781119357209, 9781119357223, 1119357160, 1119357209, 1119357225

(Ebook) Legal data for banking : business optimisation and regulatory compliance by Akber Datoo ISBN 9781119357162, 9781119357209, 9781119357223, 1119357160, 1119357209, 1119357225

PrefaceI firstencountered the capital markets and investment banks in the late 1990s.Thrust intoa trading floor environment straight from a computer science degree atCambridge University, there was a lovely mix ofmathematics, business andadrenaline on that Fixed IncomeDerivativesTrading floor that I fell in lovewithandwhich set the path for derivatives to be the one constant in my futureprofessional career.During mylifetime, technology has been a game changer in every aspect of our lives, notleast the workplace and business, with the increasing reliance on computers,the internet and smartphones, to the increasing data-enabled world and digitaleconomy.Theinvestment banking and finance industry recognised this in the late 1990s and early2000s, using technology to scale and grow business. But amongst the innovation andembracing of change, I encountered in-house legal teams and external lawyerswho were seemingly oblivious to the empowerment offered by process refinement,systems and data. The legal profession is quite rightly a conservative one inapproach – one certainly does not want lawyers to be overt risk takers, rathertrusted advisers and counsel through the risks that are taken in order tosucceed in business, and to balance legal and commercial risks as required.However, I felt the balance was wrong, and resulted in far too many missedopportunities to unlock business value through legal change.Afterwonderful years atWarburg Dillon Read (UBS by the time I had left!), including meetingmy lovely and dear wife Naila during my time in New York, I decided to go backto study, curious through my engagement with in-house lawyers at UBS,particularly through industry initiatives such as FpML and Swapswire(nowMarkitwire).There surely had to be a way to optimise business operationsand achieve through the medium of legal data, and I was hoping to find this outvia a journey through the legal profession.I wasfortunate to practise law at Allen & Overy LLP, a magic circle law firm,with an outstanding derivatives and capital markets practice. I workedalongside some of the brightest minds, many of whom had worked on keyfoundational industry documentation, such as drafting the original ISDA MasterAgreement in a mythically smoky room in 1987.It wasonly, however, duringmy secondments to the legal teams of Royal Bank ofScotland (RBS) and Credit Suisse, the latter during the midst of the FinancialCrisis and the Lehman Brothers collapse, that the importance of the legal datareally struck home. Decidingthat the time was right, with the regulatory impetus in many ways forcing thefinancial industry to recognise the importance of legal data and systems –especially given that the financial instruments at the heart of the FinancialCrisis were, in many ways, nothing more than contractual obligations – Idecided to pull the two strings together, legal and data, founding D2 LegalTechnology (D2LT) in October 2011.Over eightyears later, we are truly seeing legal data come to the fore, through the intersectionof Fintech, Regtech and Legaltech. It may be over a decade since Richard Susskindraised the spectre of technology replacing lawyers, with his sensitively titledbook The End of Lawyers, but the arrival of commercially viable artificialintelligence solutions has, quite suddenly, begun to make the vision look evermore real.The question arises, though: Have organisations truly understood thenew digital agenda – or how to respond to digital disruption? This is not justabout the use of automation to reduce headcount or drastically minimise fees.It is about delivering business value and, critically, bringing legal teams outof the ivory towers and fundamentally into the business mix. This requires notonly the use of technology, but also a critical examination of the businessneed, and the current processes used to try and meet that need. Legal data isat the heart of this.The newmodel should be about using digitisation to become data driven in order to addbusiness context to legal activity. Particularly within the specialism offinancial services, the new legal digital agenda is a chance to bring legalcounsel further into business and use digitisation and data connectivity toachieve hyper-awareness both preand post-trade. With real-time recognition ofkey events and how they may affect a position, an empowered legal team candrive new and measurable value. The greatest risk is inaction.This bookis my humble attempt to bring together some of the foundational building blocksrequired to empower the capitalmarkets business through legal data. As aresult, both technologists and lawyers will find some sections in the bookbasic for them and so they are probably best skipped over. However, I hope allreaders, be they students, legal practitioners, technologists, businessanalysts, traders, risk professionals, regulators or academics, will findsomething of use in this journey on the digitisation of the law.