Proactive compliance as a service

Proactive compliance as a service (PCaaS) represents a new approach to legal risk management. Companies face a common challenge: vast amounts of unstructured data – communications, transcripts, and documents – often contain subtle signals of potential legal issues. The roots of multimillion- or billion-dollar fines, lawsuits, or sanctions often lie in these indicators – but they are typically too rare, subtle, or dispersed to detect through traditional review methods.

To address this problem, DLA Piper developed PCaaS, combining traditional machine learning with small language models, customized to our clients and trained by the firm’s domain-specific lawyers. By tailoring models to client-specific data, policies, and legal context, PCaaS surfaces embers of potential legal issues before they become fires. Unlike reactive monitoring or whistleblower-driven investigations, this proactive approach identifies early signs of risk in real-world communications, enabling our lawyers to provide proactive legal advice to clients regarding timely intervention and mitigation.

Our findings show that PCaaS can outperform human review, machine learning models alone and even general-purpose generative AI tools in efficiency, consistency, and cost-effectiveness. By uncovering actionable insights from prospective datasets, our legal advice can be tailored to better meet clients’ needs to align workforce behavior with evolving compliance expectations, clarify areas of regulatory ambiguity, and implement targeted, low-cost interventions. The result is legal advice that is anticipatory, preventative, and grounded in continuous assessment rather than episodic review.

In this case study, we explore how PCaaS can transform risk management – shifting legal practice from a reactive response to proactive foresight.