Martim Della Valle of Anheuser-Busch InBev/courtesy photo

In another move marking the consilience of law and technology, Martim Della Valle left his job this month as global head of compliance, antitrust and litigation at Anheuser-Busch InBev in Brussels to start a new legal technology company.

Della Valle said the new company, Zenith Source, will create data analytics platforms and software to make compliance tasks simpler, more automatic and less costly. The company will be headquartered in Belgium, with operational bases in the Americas and Asia at first.

At Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest beer brewer, Della Valle and his team's tech innovations helped the company win the 2018 Corporate Counsel award for Best Legal Department in compliance in May. The company also won the 2017 Financial Times award for innovation in data, knowledge and intelligence. Their efforts became a case study at Harvard Business School.

The winning innovations included a mobile compliance app and a website that thousands of employees around the world could log into and use. Another creative solution, called BrewRight, used a huge aggregation platform that employed artificial intelligence to take compliance to a new level. It included metrics, key performance indicators, shared service centers and compliance performance targets.

“I strongly believe this is the future of compliance,” Della Valle said, “using more and more data analytics.”

While there are some companies in the marketplace doing some parts of what Zenith Source does, to the best of his knowledge none has as broad a scope as Zenith, he said.

“We want to foster corporate integrity and make compliance as efficient and cost-effective as possible,” Della Valle said. He heads the company, which includes two other partners.

The founding partners combine legal, tech and management backgrounds, he said, and are in the process of building what he called a “brain trust.”

“We will combine forces with like-minded professionals of compliance, data sciences, software engineering, law, accounting and behavioral sciences, to offer multidisciplinary, high-level services in any part of the world,” Della Valle said. The group already has a strong global network of trusted professionals in place, he added.

He explained that the new company “designs processes and metrics to help compliance teams achieve desired outputs. This can involve anything from designing dashboards to setting up back offices dedicated to compliance, as well as running empirical tests to influence corporate social norms.”

Della Valle said his passion for compliance was fueled by living and working in places that were plagued with corruption. “After a long period working in-house, I believe that companies can be prime catalysts of positive change in terms of integrity,” he added.

Zenith's potential clients include general counsel, chief compliance officers and law firms, Della Valle said. “At a later stage I would love to work for governments, especially in developing countries,” he added.

Before joining Anheuser-Busch in 2012, Della Valle was an associate at Linklaters from 2000 to 2004. He served as legal director at Brazil's AmBev, Latin America's largest brewer that is now a unit of Anheuser-Busch, from 2005 to 2011. He also was a part-time manager of a fruit production farm in Brazil from 2004 to 2011.

Della Valle is a board member of Transparency International, and was a founding board member of the European Chief Compliance and Integrity Officers' Forum.

At the beginning of September, Della Valle became one of several in-house counsel who this year moved into areas where law and tech innovation are converging: In January, Lucy Bassli left her job as assistant general counsel at Microsoft Corp. to establish InnoLegal Services, a law and consulting firm on developing the law practice of the future, both in firms and in-house legal departments. In June, David Cambria, longtime head of legal ops at Aon Corp. and then Archer Daniels Midland, joined Baker McKenzie as the law firm's first global director of legal operations.

Now Della Valle has followed suit. He said, “After a nice cycle working for large organizations, I wanted to combine the thrill of a startup with the freedom of doing things in the way I believe, with a shared set of values and the nimbleness only startups can offer.”