Law schools and law firms are providing new tools to help clients deal with increasing amounts of data. In one case, Stanford Law School and Sullivan & Cromwell recently launched the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Clearinghouse (FCPAC), a public database that aggregates and curates source documents and provides analytics tools related to enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

The FCPAC provides a free database of enforcement actions and information related to the FCPA. Users can search and sort data about FCPA enforcement actions according to their individual needs and interests. They can view original documents, read relevant laws and precedents, and see articles about FCPA compliance and enforcement.

“The key here is a very carefully designed data base structure,” Joseph Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School, told Legaltech News. “Constructing the database design requires extensive cooperation between software engineers and lawyers with deep knowledge of the domain that’s being analyzed: You have to anticipate the important research questions so as to build a database that can respond to user demand. We’re exceptionally fortunate to have a very knowledgeable database engineer, Juan Carlos Sanchez, who works closely with our legal analytic team, Kristen Savelle and William Garrett, along with counsel from Sullivan & Cromwell, to build a structure that is simultaneously detailed and robust. It’s a task that simultaneously requires great attention to detail and broad imagination to appreciate how detailed information might be analyzed in new and insightful ways.”