Clutch Group has evolved over the ten years since its founding to become a global, enterprise-class legal, risk, and compliance solutions company. During this evolution and growth, Clutch Group has maintained a culture of excellence focused on client delivery and cutting-edge technology.
In an interview with the firm’s Varun Mehta, he lifts the lid on the firm’s diverse portfolio of legal solutions includes managed review, eDiscovery, regulatory consulting, data remediation, monitoring and analytics, contract management, regulatory surveillance and audio analytics.
|How do you ensure that your firm stands out from the competition? Clutch Group’s main differentiator from competitors is the way we infuse leading technology, process consulting, and fact development into our work. At our core, we are not a body shop or a data processing firm; we are designed from the ground up to help our clients better understand their own internal data and to identify and mitigate large-scale legal and compliance risks.
We firmly believe that the consultative approach we bring to our work is ahead of the curve and marks a distinctive shift in the legal services paradigm. Clutch Group do not just retroactively solve legal problems – we identify them in advance – and we work with our clients to make sure they are ready to tackle the most vexing legal issues. Our strategy moving forward is to continue to invest heavily in our people, process, and technology.
I am convinced that technology has an essential role to play in helping companies not only engage in more sophisticated eDiscovery and document review exercises, but also to assess their risk and compliance efforts in real-time, rather than retroactively. In addition to bolstering our eDiscovery services, we have invested in technology that allows our clients to make better sense of their business environments and to actively engage in compliance and risk-related surveillance activities.
Can you tell me how your firm has made your mark within the industry and what experience and expertise can you lend to your clients?
Clutch Group has excelled at breaking down some of the greatest legal and compliance challenges and developing succinct tools and processes to showcase our expertise and solve those challenges affecting the industries we operate in. We have coupled our unparalleled understanding of the regulatory environment with expertise in handling major data volumes within these industries. Our goal has not been in giving companies a piece of hardware, software or increased labour, but rather using technology to streamline processes and promote the consistent evolution of legal technologies in eDiscovery, review and surveillance. The industry is coming to us and asking for a new way of thinking.
Why is it important to have a dedicated team of specialists in place who strive to achieve the best possible outcome for all parties? We at Clutch Group have made a conscious decision to focus on a limited group of industries, with financial services as our major focus. The firm has made this decision to develop true industry expertise and to fully understand the depth of challenges that our clients routinely face. Our experts are unparalleled in their understanding of the different types of data and systems that financial organisations and how to use their data to better understand routine business challenges to large-scale regulatory challenges.
Clutch Group has developed a strong financial services expertise by hiring former regulators, traders and financial analyst, and are now the leading eDiscovery and managed review provider for companies in the financial services industry. We are, at our core, a client-centric organisation – our client engagement philosophy is to grow with our clients and to develop deep enterprise-level relationships.
The firm has handled some of the largest and most sensitive regulatory investigations from the past several years, including LIBOR, Forex RMBS, CMBS, FCPA and other major market issues. On the regulatory front, we have combined our expertise in financial markets and products and our data analytics capabilities to develop a wide range of risk and compliance solutions around regulatory change management and data surveillance.
What challenges and opportunities lie ahead for the legal industry in the future? The aspects of legal services that customers find valuable are undergoing a major shift. Companies are not only looking for ways to cut costs, but also innovative analytics and reporting that will help them understand the value of the services they receive. The classic time and material models simply do not make sense in the current climate and are being redefined consistently. For example, projects utilising fresh associates out of law firms to deliver basic tasks can now be fully automated at a speed and efficiency level previously unseen in the industry.
The other big shift is that multinational companies are dealing with more intense cross border regulatory challenges and this is adding a layer of complication when attempting to impress goodfaith compliance practices across an industry. Settlements are increasingly imposing enhanced compliance obligations on financial institutions. The practical effect is that what was once industry leading is today an industry standard. The key necessities are effective and active compliance controls and procedures.
Where in recent history, regulators have been content to allow outside counsel to conduct investigations and provide reports as to the findings, evidence suggest that pendulum may swing in the opposite direction soon. Not only will findings have to be defended, but the actual process of conducting discovery will need to be documented and defended just a robustly, if not to an even greater degree.
Company: Clutch Group
Name: Varun Mehta
Email: Varun.mehta@ clutchgroup.com
Web: www.clutchgroup.com
Address: 370 Lexington Avenue, Suite 1410, New York, NY 10017
Telephone: 1 212 804 7215
