London-based fintech startup Nivaura has launched a general-purpose legal markup language (GLML) plug-in for Microsoft Word, which lives in the Word ribbon and helps lawyers to annotate legal documents so that they become machine readable, without needing to code.
It follows the launch in 2019 of a GLML consortium, which focuses on capital markets and is driving towards the adoption of a common data standard in financial services, through the creation and maintenance of data points in the GLML taxonomy.
The plug in means that a lawyer can take a static pro-forma template and apply GLML to that document. The structured data can then be mapped to downstream processes and systems without manual key entry.
GLML was developed by Nivaura along with input from several leading international law firms including Allen & Overy and Linklaters, starting in 2017. Nivaura’s debt capital markets product, Aurora, automatically generates debt issuance transaction workflows from pro-forma documents that have been annotated with GLML.
Aurora enables data to flow automatically from upstream processes (i.e. term sheet negotiation) to enable faster completion of the final terms document.
Phil Smith, chair of the GLML Foundation commented: “The release of the GLML plugin for testing is an important step in the adoption of GLML and the drive toward common data standards in the market. While the industry discusses and converges on a common taxonomy, GLML provides an optimal way for taxonomies to be implemented into documentation and data flows. The GLML Foundation will be hosting a series of training sessions for lawyers and non-programmers to utilise the MS Word plug-in to annotate documentation.”
The plug-in will initially be offered to users at Linklaters and Allen & Overy.