Joseph Grundfest founded Stanford Law School’s Securities Class Action Clearinghouse a decade-and-a-half ago to track data related to private federal securities fraud litigation. The clearinghouse has made public filings for individual cases available to practitioners and academics alike and has aggregated data to track trends in the field. This February Grundfest teamed with researchers and data scientists at Stanford and a group of lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell to launch the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Clearinghouse, a new tool tracking cases brought by U.S. prosecutors targeting bribery abroad.

Where did the idea for the FCPA Clearinghouse come from? First, we’ve been at the clearinghouse business with our securities class action site for like 15 years. So, we have substantial experience and expertise in deeply monitoring and curating a very specific area of the law and in building those resources that are simultaneously useful to scholars, practitioners and policy makers. Then, you sort of have a look at what’s going on in the world today and you realize that corruption is a growth industry and there’s a lot of it in the world. U.S. and foreign authorities are going to be expanding their interest in that space. And our bet was that if we take the experience that we’ve built in terms of aggregating and curating publicly available information around securities litigation and brought that to bear on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act litigation, we’d have another valuable resource. One of the things you learn from Silicon Valley is not to invest in dying industries.

There’s some meaty analysis of foreign corruption cases in the capsules available on the site. Is any of that analysis done by technology? No. We have real people who know about this. We have a small team who look through it and develop some of the analysis.

Who are they? They’re terrific. What we’ve got is [associate director of empirical research] Kristen Savelle, [content and data analytics manager] William Garrett, and Juan-Carlos Sanchez—our database guru-slash-IT genius. And then we also get terrific input from some of our friends at Sullivan & Cromwell. There we’ve got Brendan Cullen, Laura Kabler Oswell, and Nathaniel Green.