As a technology platform provider, you inevitably have certain visions of what applications your customers will one day build with your product. For example, Mark Logic Founder Christopher Lindblad originally envisioned that customers would spider and enrich Internet content, enabling an XQuery Internet search box as opposed to the typical keyword-oriented one. Christopher’s vision became reality a few years back when we started working in open source intelligence.
Being the “business guy” half of the Mark Logic equation, my vision was a little less, well, visionary. I’d always wanted someone to do something with contracts. They’re high value content, particularly when you’re either being sued or evaluating risk. They’re semi-structured; they have lots of sections and subsections and entities. But they’re typically messy, not in any type of explicit schema, per se. And, if you’re really good, they have lots of revisions that you can watch change over time.
Net/net: contracts are important, there’s a lot of structure and complexity associated with them, and -–to be blunt -– most organizations have effectively no idea what’s in them. So I always viewed them as a ripe target for MarkLogic Server.
I’m happy to report that docGenix has made that vision a reality. Founded by lawyer, self-taught programmer, and “legal rebel” Michael Will, docGenix specializes in the management of derivatives contracts: the pair-wise master agreements between parties that govern the trading of the their derivatives contracts. Among other things, these contracts help organizations evaluate risk and perform scenario analyses –- e.g., what would happen to our portfolio if counter-party X had their credit rating dropped to BBB+? And a typical financial institution will have tens of thousands of these agreements.
Here’s an excerpt on the origins of docGenix from the ABA Journals story, linked above:
Michael Will probably wasn’t the first finance attorney to look at a derivatives security and think, “There’s got to be an easier way of doing this.” But he certainly is one of the first attorneys to actually try to find that easier way.
In a chance hallway encounter in Allen & Overy’s London office, an information technology manager challenged Will to use a piece of development software. Will went home that night and then “didn’t sleep for six months. I did my regular job during the day and taught myself to program at night.”
Nearly a decade later, Will is the founder and chief technology officer for two Allen & Overy affiliates: Derivative Services, which opened in 2002, and docGenix, which opened in 2008. Derivative Services summarizes and delivers attorney analyses of legal opinions used in derivatives transactions. DocGenix takes that process a step further, relying on computers to analyze derivatives agreements, improve risk management and streamline the process for reviewing, updating and modifying derivatives agreements.
In addition to having a built a nice UI for searching these contracts, and a system for importing them, docGenix has paid particular attention to the idiosyncratic way in various facts, or “data points,” are expressed. For example, there are numerous ways to express a “ratings trigger” -– rating to exceed BBB+, rating not to drop below A-, rating to be A- or above, and on and on. docGenix reports that they typically identify between 1,500 to 8,500 data points per contract. Once identified, these data points are identified in XML in a canonical form and become queryable.
If this story’s piqued your interest, you should know that we are hosting a webinar with docGenix as the featured guest on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 8:00 AM PDT / 11:00 AM EDT, featuring John Berry, general counsel at docGenix and Steve Mount from Mark Logic. Here’s an except from the registration page:
Leveraging MarkLogic Server’s high-performance, scalable XML capabilities, docGenix Synopsys is a powerful, user-friendly application that provides financial institutions with deeper visibility and a more holistic view across their ISDA Agreement portfolios. Synopsys harnesses the power of XML and MarkLogic Server, to give financial institutions the agility to effectively analyze and respond to the threats and opportunities associated with today’s OTC derivatives markets.
For more information and/or to register for the webinar, please go here.
Meantime, if you’d like to hear more from Michael Will, I’ve embedded a video of him talking about docGenix, below.
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