Regulatory frameworks are in a state of constant evolution, both across industries and around the world. In the post Covid-19 world, governmental regulation related to the fallout from the pandemic has taken center stage. In recent times, we have continued to hear about the concept of deregulation as a recurring theme. However, Covid-19 has ensured that regulation continues to be essential as a mechanism for shaping, correcting, and protecting the most varied range of markets, their agents and stakeholders.
In the United States, the passage of the wide CARES Act in response to the pandemic with its wide ranging impact on the economy has underscored the importance of regulation in the 21st century. A similar trend has been followed by governments of various countries across the world with regulatory action, especially related to the financial sector, proving vital in the fight against Covid-19.
In modern times, most governmental intervention is executed not by legislation but through agency regulatory activity. In the U.S. itself, there exist several regulatory bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) among others. They are a snapshot of the various regulatory bodies that are responsible for making and enforcing regulations in relation to their field. These agencies function as an essential tool for a modern government that has to react and keep up with market dynamism at a pace that both the legislative process and courts are unable to keep up with. With the importance of transparency in business rising and the increasing costs of non-compliance with laws and regulations, businesses worldwide are striving to adapt to greater pressure from regulatory agencies.
The Importance of a Regulatory Regime for a Lawyer
The primary function of a lawyer is in essence helping clients navigate the law. Considering the majority of the business activity in the world is governed by agency issued regulation rather than the black letter of the law, most legal advice lawyers will give throughout their careers will be based on regulation. An essential skill for lawyers in the modern age is their ability to navigate the myriad regulatory sphere in order to advise their clients on the regulations applicable to their organizations. In most modern day scenarios, any organization irrespective of the nature of its business will likely have to comply with regulations from multiple regulatory bodies and not just the ones that relate to its primary business. For example, an entity whose primary business involves pharmaceuticals will also have to be in compliance with EPA regulations with regard to their manufacturing process, in addition to complying with FDA guidelines. A glance at the Federal Register which currently lists 454 Federal agencies with a broad range of powers including rulemaking, oversight, and spending, gives a clear snapshot of the vast breadth of regulatory bodies currently in the U.S.
The financial industry is one of the most heavily and dynamically regulated industries. The surge of crowdfunding, cryptocurrencies, and mobile payment methods are living proof of the complexity and ever-evolving nature of the regulatory perimeter of financial agencies. It is a prerequisite for anyone who wants to excel in the legal profession to master the art of keeping up with regulatory change, and to be able to efficiently comb through the weeds of regulatory content published at an increasing pace.
The inability to keep up with these changes carries an enormous risk for the regulated entities. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initiated 862 enforcement actions including 526 standalone actions in the year 2019, and obtained judgments and orders totalling more than $4.3 billion in disgorgement and penalties. The ability to track the enforcement activity and trends of the relevant agencies gives legal professionals a tremendous comparative advantage when advising clients — not only on regulatory compliance, but also when negotiating contracts, structuring deals, or when advising clients to commence litigation.
Modern Times Necessitate Modern Solutions
Compliance.ai is a regulatory technology (RegTech) company with a modern solution designed to help legal and compliance professionals in the financial services industry, track and monitor regulatory changes in an ever-changing world, through the use of supervised machine learning. Supervised machine learning, often referred to as “Human-in-the-Loop,” is one of the most effective methods of machine learning available to date, and considered a best practice for Artificial Intelligence solutions. Through this method of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Compliance.ai is able to automate the collection and classification of different regulatory and agency issued documents, such as regulations, proposed rules, guidelines, white papers, and enforcement actions, among many others.
To achieve a high precision rate when classifying and organizing these regulatory documents, it is of the utmost importance that human judgments from human-in-the-loop methodologies are accurate and well-reasoned. Understanding and distinguishing sophisticated legal documents requires skill and training to render optimal results. Compliance.ai leverages an “Expert-in-the-Loop” model, which, as its name implies, requires the judgment of domain expertise to define the subtle differences between different types of legal documents. For example, understanding the difference between documents that deal with securities regulation in general from documents that address broker-dealer fiduciary duties, or the difference between consumer and commercial lending requires a skilled assessment.
Compliance.ai’s Contributor Program
Compliance.ai leverages a unique crowdsourced-based supervised learning model, which gives law students and legal professionals an opportunity to gain first-hand exposure to an innovative technology that dynamically processes the most abundant collection of regulatory content.
Technology is disrupting the traditional ways that the legal world interacts with the real world of business, industries, and consumers. By becoming a Regulatory Hero via the Contributor Program, aspiring legal practitioners, law professors, and domain experts will gain exposure to the latest RegTech platform, and benefit from deep knowledge into the most relevant issues to the financial industry. Law students will have an opportunity to learn how to discern between distinct regulatory topics, and will stay updated on the most recent regulations, proposed rules, and enforcement trends.
The director of the Contributor Program is an international lawyer with years of experience in different countries. He can attest to the fact that regulation is an integral part of the legal structure of countries worldwide. In a globalized world, businesses need to keep up and comply with regulations among many jurisdictions across the U.S. and the world. Compliance.ai opens a window to, and sheds light on the obscure landscape of regulatory change, and it enables its users to stay on top of managing these changes. In the context of the post Covid-19 landscape, the contributor program is uniquely suited to meet the new normal of remote working that is bound to become an integral tool for the functioning of the legal industry in the future.
After obtaining his law degree from Berkeley, our Contributor Program director became Legal Associate for Compliance.ai while preparing for the California Bar Exam. This experience gave him a new perspective on the way financial regulations work in the U.S., and how fast the regulatory landscape evolves. Having reviewed and judged thousands of regulatory documents while contributing to Compliance.ai’s network, he developed the skill of being able to swiftly identify and understand different types of regulations, guidelines, and enforcement actions. In addition to his document analysis skills, the program gave him an opportunity to evaluate the impact of new regulations on the financial market, and how these regulations relate to enforcement activity. For attorneys in the compliance industry, this is a key competitive advantage, because it provides important context on issues that matter the most to both regulated firms(clients) and their regulators.
Asif Alam is the Chief Executive Officer at Compliance.ai. A leader in shaping disruptive technology, his experience includes building products using AI and natural language processing for GRC, payments, lending, risk, trading, and new solutions, from Fortune 500 companies to startups.
In his most recent role, he served as the Chief Strategy Officer of ThoughtTrace, unlocking new revenue streams and markets, and reignite portfolio growth. ThoughTrace was then acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2021.
He brings more than 20 years of management and business experience; increasing profitability, unlocking new revenue streams and markets, and reignite portfolio growth for companies like Thomson Reuters, Crux Informatics, and Finastra. Asif is a forward-thinking expert driving engagement via client forums, public presentations, and white papers.
Cesar Lee is a Principal at WRV, a venture capital fund focused on early-stage investments in hardware, semiconductor, and other technology-related companies. Previously, he was an investment professional at Riverwood Capital, a technology-focused, late-stage venture capital, and private equity fund. He began his career at RBC Capital Markets, where he was part of the Mergers & Acquisitions group for two years and the Equity-linked & Derivatives group for one year. While at RBC, Cesar spent a majority of his time working on M&A advisory transactions for technology companies.
Cesar’s investment experience includes buyouts, later stage, early stage and seed rounds. Cesar has completed transaction in the U.S., Latin America, and Asia, and in technology sectors including data centers, software, semiconductors, consumer electronics, robotics, big data, and internet.
Maria Devassy is a RegTech, Content, and Technology leader with over 20 years of experience helping companies bridge the gap between technology, product, and business. Maria has held leadership positions with MetricStream, KPMG, Oracle Corporation, and other technology companies. She has launched several successful RegTech products, business partnerships, and advised Fortune 100 clients on risk management, audit, advisory, and compliance business across Industries.
Hugh Cadden is a recognized expert in derivative financial and trading markets including futures, options, and swaps. Hugh is currently a senior consultant and expert with OnPoint Analytics, Inc. an economic, finance and statistical consultancy specializing in expert testimony for complex litigation. He has been specializing in the organization, operation, and regulation of financial and trading markets for over 40 years. Hugh’s experience includes both the public and private sectors and he has held senior level positions with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission including serving as Director of the Division of Trading and Markets and Deputy Director of Enforcement. He has been qualified as an expert on financial and trading market matters before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. Tax Court, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, National Futures Association, American Arbitration Association and federal courts.
Drake Ross is a former bank regulator who specialized in compliance with consumer protection regulations while at the OCC, FDIC, and OTS. While at these agencies, he provided extensive training and guidance and developed materials to ensure full comprehension and proper application of rules, laws, policies, and guidance, and served as a Subject Matter Expert in numerous areas. Because of his expertise, he often presented at agency and industry events. He also played a significant role in successful windup of the 2008 IndyMac Bank failure, where because of his extensive knowledge of the FDIC deposit insurance regulations, he was called upon to administer highly-complex insurance determinations.
Carliss Chatman is an Assistant Professor of Law teaching Contracts, Agency and Unincorporated Entities, Corporations, and Transactional Skills. Her work is influenced by over two decades of service on non-profit boards and involvement with community organizations. Through leadership positions, she has developed expertise in corporate governance and non-profit regulation. She has also been instrumental in strategic planning and fundraising efforts. Prior to law teaching, Professor Chatman was a commercial litigation attorney in Houston, Texas. In practice, she focused on trial law, appeals and arbitration in pharmaceutical, health care, mass torts, product liability, as well as oil, gas, and mineral law. In addition to negotiating settlements and obtaining successful verdicts, Professor Chatman has also analyzed and drafted position statements regarding the constitutionality of statutes and the impact of statutory revisions for presentation to the Texas Legislature.
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Mariam is an Operating Principal at Cota Capital. Mariam has experience providing guidance on strategic and operational planning to Venture and Growth stage companies. Prior to Cota Capital, Mariam spent her career in management consulting as a Director at KPMG. She has experience leading global transformation programs and developing innovative service offerings for Fortune 500 companies in the Technology sector. Mariam has an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson school of management with an emphasis in Finance and Entrepreneurship. She has a Bachelors in Science in Finance and a Bachelors in Science in Economics from Santa Clara University.
Chris Callison-Burch is an Associate Professor in Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include natural language understanding and crowdsourcing. He has served the Association for Computational Linguistics as the General Chair for the ACL 2017 conference, as an action editor for the Transactions of the ACL, as an editorial board member for the Computational Linguistics journal, and an officer for NAACL (the North American chapter of the ACL) and for SIGDAT (the special interest group for linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to natural language processing)
Tom Ladt is an experienced executive and investor. Tom has lead and served on the boards of several public and private companies serving highly regulated industries such as technology, healthcare, real estate, and food processing. Tom has also served in key governmental roles and on numerous community boards.
Jeroen Plink is a global executive with a proven track record of developing and growing businesses, teams, and technologies with innovation and passion. Jeroen was CEO of Practical Law US during its acquisition by Thomson Reuters. He now serves on numerous boards and acts as a strategic consultants for start-ups.
Global Legal and Compliance executive with 15+ years of success in the SaaS technology and financial services industries. Partner to the CEO and executive team in corporate transactions, business development, product expansion, and regulatory navigation during periods of intense growth and organizational change. An advocate of effective risk management that starts with sound business practices and putting the customer first.
Richard Dupree has held multiple Risk, Compliance and Operations positions at regional, national, and global financial services firms including Wells Fargo, Silicon Valley Bank, Bank of the West and BNP Paribas. Rick currently advises FinTechs and RegTechs and sits on industry panels, contributes to industry whitepapers, thought leadership efforts, and speaks at industry seminars on Risk and Compliance challenges faced by banks and FinTechs.
Brian advises clients on legal and regulatory compliance in the financial, tech, and procurement sectors. His passion is helping businesses succeed in heavily regulated environments. As counsel and trusted advisor to businesses of all sizes, and as a former regulator, policymaker, and federal official, Brian acutely understands the unintended burdens that even well-intentioned government requirements can put on innovation and business growth, as well as how to create policies that strike the right balance.
Brian served as National Ombudsman in the Obama Administration, leading the federal Office of Regulatory Enforcement Fairness in assisting hundreds of startups, entrepreneurs, and small business owners in every industry and every state.
Dr. Marsha Ershaghi Hames is Managing Director of Strategy & Development at LRN, a leader in advising and educating organizations about ethics and regulatory compliance, as well as corporate culture, governance and leadership. With the focus of inspired behavior versus required behavior, LRN is a leading voice in the industry for companies to build ethical cultures instead of “check-the-box” compliance approaches. She’s advised Department of Justice corporate monitors on successful program transformation under CIAs (Corporate Integrity Agreements. With over 20 years of experience in leading multinational ethics and compliance strategies, Marsha has become a highly sought-after thought leader on leading Corporate Compliance and Ethics practices.
Carla Carriveau is currently the Senior Managing Counsel at Wealthfront, an automatic investment service firm in Redwood City, California. Carla was previously Senior Counsel, Division of Trading and Markets, at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. As a former regulator with over 15 years of experience in helping small businesses navigate legal and regulatory needs in the financial services sector, Carla advises Compliance.ai on financial services regulation, the regulatory landscape and industry practices.
