A novel partnership between Clifford Chance and Thomson Reuters was unveiled earlier this week as legal service providers look for innovative ways to help their financial institution clients adapt to onerous new OTC derivatives regulation.
Thomson Reuters is leveraging its contract automation software, Contract Express and abstraction technology built specifically for OTC documentation, working in tandem with Clifford Chance, which is a world leader in the derivatives sector.
The pair will advise banks across the European Union, United States and Asia which are having to prepare for new margin variation rules, involving high volume contract reviews.
While in the recent past this would have involved mobilising vast teams of lawyers at a huge cost to banks, Clifford Chance’s partnership with Thomson Reuters is said to offer a more flexible, scalable solution. Thomson Reuters’ technology platform enables its teams to extract key terms from existing documentation and rapidly generate compliant and consistent new documentation.
The new partnership follows in the wake of Allen & Overy’s online offering MarginMatrix and Axiom’s new derivatives offering, which has seen it leverage its technology and legal team to win derivatives work from numerous global banks.
MarginMatrix, meanwhile, generates compliant contracts that are then negotiated by Deloitte’s managed services team.
“By working with Thomson Reuters we can combine our deep understanding of the difficult challenges financial institutions face with a powerful, scalable delivery platform to offer clients the best of both worlds,” said Paul Landless of Clifford Chance Singapore. “The fact that we can fully support from Clifford Chance teams across New York, London, Europe and Asia Pacific to work with Thomson Reuters places us perfectly to tackle both the local regulatory issues and the complex, international challenges our clients face.”
