UK-headquartered client payments and compliance software provider Legl is saving clients around 10-15% of time in their client due diligence checks by using a generative AI ‘smart layer’ to surface the most pertinent analysis of flagged due diligence results.
Legl is a platform that enables law firms to digitise their core business processes, and a lot of the work it does is in the risk and compliance space.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Legl founder and CEO Julia Salasky said: “It’s one thing to automate something so firms have a single source of truth but when you have this data, you can move from a single source of truth to applying compliance analysis tools on top.”
CDD Assist, which was launched in August, searches thousands of data sources for compliance flags and Salasky says: “Normally piecing it all together is the work of a highly skilled person but CDD Assist is an AI layer showing the source data, with a summary and analysis.”
Legl built CDD Assist initially using Anthropic but moved to OpenAI Azure so they can ringfence the data within the UK. Salasky says that customer data isn’t used to train the model and is segregated from other OpenAI projects.
CDD Assist is a free, separate offering in the UI and Salasky says: “You can choose not to use it, but we’ve found that firms using it have replaced a whole layer of thinking they had to do and can focus on higher value tasks. We can see in the product itself that reviews are taking 10-15% less time. One firm told us that it’s become so BAU they don’t know how to give feedback. It’s really cool to see it go from solving a problem to table stakes in a matter of weeks.”
One firm that has given a review is Essex and Central London law firm Fisher Jones Greenwood, where compliance officer for finance administration (COFA) and money laundering reporting officer (MLRO) Paula Fowler said: “Within a month of adopting Legl’s CDD AI Assist we’ve been able to reduce the time spent on initial analysis for complex compliance flags, and make better, and significantly faster, risk-based decisions. It’s been a very useful enhancement increasing our turnaround time and speed of service delivery.”
In terms of the roadmap, Salasky says: “There is so much complexity linked to law firm policy and regulatory guidance, and someone has to triage those things. So we’re moving towards the tool kit being able to say ‘according to our policy this client requires enhanced due diligence or our MLRO to have another look.’ That’s what we’re expanding into.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com