Legaltech News, Law360 Pulse Spotlight Akin’s OverRuled Sanctions Module
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Legal media covered the full launch of Akin’s OverRuled legal data productivity platform this week (learn more here).
In “Akin Expands Proprietary Legal Research Tool OverRuled, Aiming to Tame Proliferating Sanction Regulations,” Legaltech News described the launch of the first module, the Russian Trade Controls Resource Center, of the firm’s new legal research platform OverRuled just months after Russia invaded Ukraine. Its goal, notes Legaltech, was to assist in-house attorneys in understanding the proliferating export and trade requirements regarding Russia.
The article notes that the firm, on April 6, expanded the subscription-based legal research globally, allowing users access to the full OverRuled suite, including sanctions modules for all countries on the U.S. sanctions list, which can be subscribed to individually or, at a higher cost, in their entirety.
OverRuled co-leaders and Akin international trade partners Mac Fadlallah and Kim Myers told Legaltech that OverRuled is the product of more than five years’ research, which involved compiling data from sources such as the Treasury Department and its Office of Foreign Asset Controls, then testing it with Akin lawyers and building the IT infrastructure that would allow its artificial intelligence component to learn and present the date in the form of maps, among other preparatory steps.
Mac said that the Russia module was put up “nearly overnight. But the only reason we were able to do that is by leveraging the underlying OverRuled database that had been years in the making.”
He described how the firm, at first, was alerting clients via email, which clients said was too complicated. In response to that feedback and the exponential growth in sanctions—“500 different sanctions in the last 13 months alone”—the firm moved to make things “more searchable and filterable…so searching things that you would search here would enable you to find it in a matter of seconds when it would take you around an hour to fin otherwise,” said Mac.
Read the full article here.
In its article “Akin Launches Data Analytics Platform OverRuled,” Law360 Pulse described the module as featuring a world map that shows which U.S. sanctions are being imposed on other countries. The platform then allows users to determine, via the module’s machine-learning-driven penalties algorithm, OverRuled Predictor, how much certain actions would cost.
Mac said that he and colleagues spent thousands of hours developing this platform in order to make it easier to search sanctions date: “It started off with us downloading various enforcement actions and making them searchable inside of a folder that only a few of us had access to.”
The article notes that last year, responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to subsequent client feedback about the difficulties of keeping up with sanctions updates solely through reading firm emails, Akin created the Russia Trade Controls Resource Center.
Kim Myers said that the firm plans to release China Trade Controls Resource Center and export control modules later in 2023. She noted, “One of the primary things that OverRuled does is pull all of that information from [Office of Foreign Assets Control] together into a single platform that is keyword searchable and tagged, so that the materials are available and you can tell what they relate to much more quickly.”
Mac noted that he hopes that the firm will release modules in other practices for the OverRuled platform in 2024: “OverRuled is at its core a legal data productivity platform, so as far as we're concerned, the sky's the limit for what other modules we may announce.”
