We have all become used to the idea of extracting insights from litigation docket data. But regulatory analytics appearto be emerging as an exciting new area for practice and competitive insights. Intelligize just launched a new feature which offers interactive Insights derived from from No Action letters enabling lawyers and financial analysts to glean quick insights into No Action Letter grants and denials by company, issue an law firm. No action letters are used by companies  to  send inquiries to the Securities & Exchange Commission Staff in order to determine if certain activities, actions or products would violate federal securities law.

New Analytics show

  • Top Shareholder Proposal Subcategories – trends
  • Successful requests by law firms – League tables
  • Most Cited Letters – find key seminal letters that became precedent
  • Request Outcomes -See incoming letter to the SEC and the past letters the the SEC concurred on, were unable to concur on requests which were withdrawn.

Other Enhancements

  • New and improved Search filters – search by requester CIK (Central Index Key)
  • Document Grouping – view the complete correspondence for any No Action Letter request in one place.
  • Document View – see all the documents and dates of important letters with corresponding dates.
  • No Action Letter Archive back to 1973

The graphic below is based on the last twelve month of No Action Letters available from the SEC/The “live” version of the graphic below will allows researcher to click on each part of the graph and view the underlying documents.

The dashboard also shows the most cited letters and top shareholder proposal sub-categories.

Intelligize No Action Letter Analytics

The Expanding Landscape of Regulatory Analytics
The first thing I noticed about the Intelligize chart was the huge crescent of blue indicating No Action Letters submitted by General Counsel Offices – I couldn’t help but wonder if we could get historical data to see if this was work moving in-house – work formerly done by outside counsel. And then there are the comparative outcomes by law firms – which are essentially league tables. Data which law firms can use for pitching clients and recruiting laterals as well as gaining insights into the SEC’s NAL history in addressing specific issues.
The only other S.E.C. regulatory analytics product I am aware of is Bloomberg Law’s SEC enforcement analytics which they launched in 2018.

These two products are clearly the “green shoots” of an important new trend regulatory analytics which can provide lawyers with competitive and practice insights.