CLCorporate Affairs

CL Corporate Affairs is an independent public affairs consultancy that designs advocacy and influence strategies, notably for organisations operating in sensitive, heavily regulated or high-stakes sectors. Drawing on institutional experience at the European level, as well as in France, Italy and Luxembourg, it pays particular attention to the reputational and regulatory risks its clients face, helping them navigate environments that are ever more complex and uncertain.

This specialisation is no accident. The clients CL Corporate Affairs works with operate in sectors subject to heightened public scrutiny (regulators, public opinion, the media, political actors), of a structurally greater intensity than average. Working day in, day out with organisations exposed to a high degree of pressure, on reputation on the one hand, and on regulatory constraint on the other, forges a singular professional discipline.

Accordingly, transparency, credibility and confidentiality are not values to be reconciled in the abstract; they are the ordinary conditions of practising a craft specific to potentially sensitive actors and often delicate contexts.

This exposure, far from being a weakness, unfolds as a demanding apprenticeship in what a substantive commitment and a relationship of trust with public decision-makers truly require.

It is to better help its clients meet these challenges, which directly affect their business models, and sometimes even their very legitimacy, that CL Corporate Affairs decided to create Compass.

Compass was born out of a constraint faced daily by its founder. European public affairs work relies on legislative and political information that is, by nature, both abundant and scattered, spread across institutional websites, parliamentary trackers, official journals and public registers, none of them designed for the workflow of the thousands of practitioners who depend on this information to do their job. The cost of simply gathering and reconciling these sources, before any actual analytical work can begin, is disproportionate to the value it generates.

Freeing practitioners from low-value, repetitive groundwork, so judgement can focus on what actually generates value.

Compass was designed to address that frustration: it structures the collection of publicly available information, draws, where useful, on AI to enrich and contextualise it, and organises the engagement with relevant stakeholders into a coherent workflow. The point is not to replace professional judgement: it is to free practitioners from the low-value, repetitive parts of the work, so that they can focus on what actually generates added value: political analysis, strategic positioning and meaningful interaction with decision-makers.

Compass is the product of more than seven years of consulting experience in EU public affairs and institutional relations. The platform is therefore not a generic SaaS retrofitted to the field, but a tool calibrated by and for practitioners, that mobilises CL Corporate Affairs’ own expertise into a piece of infrastructure open to the entire community, in a logic of professional cooperation within a structurally competitive ecosystem. It is an act of practical solidarity among peers: even when they operate in different sectors, practitioners share the same awareness of the professional-ethics rules that frame the craft, and of the constraints those rules impose day to day.

It follows that access to the platform is not unconditional. Compass is granted in strict compliance with the public affairs consulting profession’s code of conduct, with the obligations arising from the applicable regulations (notably the European Union’s Transparency Register and its Code of Conduct, established by the Interinstitutional Agreement of 20 May 2021, as well as, in France, the « Sapin II » Law of 9 December 2016 and the digital register of interest representatives kept by the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life (HATVP), together with its own code-of-conduct obligations), and subject to compatibility with the engagements of CL Corporate Affairs and its clients: a direct competitor pursuing public-policy objectives that would conflict with CL’s professional commitments would not be granted access. This is not an arbitrarily drawn restriction, but the very condition of the platform’s credibility: an outside peer would have no reason to trust the tool if its operator failed to honour, in this respect, the rules that govern the entire community of public affairs professionals.

Refusing access to a direct competitor whose engagements would conflict with ours is the condition of the platform’s credibility.

Most of the digital tools available to public affairs professionals today are built by software vendors, generalist web developers or media operators, competent in their own craft but external to the actual workflow of EU institutional engagement. Compass takes the opposite approach: the people who use the tool first are the same ones who designed it. That makes the product more directly useful, and it also forces a different kind of attention to detail: the granularity of legislative procedures, what a stakeholder mapping needs to capture in practice, what a good engagement record looks like for someone who will actually have to use it under deadline.

The people who use the tool first are the same ones who designed it.

That same exposure to sustained public pressure, which defines the consultancy’s day-to-day practice, shapes the way the platform has been built. In sectors where transparency, credibility and the protection of sensitive material are part of the everyday job, the ethical demands of the profession are not experienced as a compliance burden; they are experienced as an opportunity to build something more robust: a deliberately demanding ethical positioning, paired with rigorous technical guarantees on confidentiality. This professional-ethics constraint is, in this sense, a feature of the product, not a hurdle around it.

This professional-ethics constraint is, in this sense, a feature of the product, not a hurdle around it.

Compass is offered to fellow practitioners and other organisations active in the same ecosystem, in line with the profession’s ethical standards. The tension inherent to a public affairs firm offering a working tool to its peers is acknowledged head-on, and addressed by a deliberately demanding ethical positioning that is regarded as differentiating: an explicit conflict-of-interest policy, a contractual commitment never to read user-authored content, and the option of end-to-end encryption that each user can activate, making confidentiality a property of the system itself rather than only a promise.

A strong, deliberately demanding ethical positioning regarded as differentiating.

The technical guarantees mobilised here are not bespoke or experimental: Compass relies on the same cryptographic standards used by leading zero-knowledge applications (notably the two-key, key-wrapping design popularised by professional password managers and end-to-end encrypted messengers such as Signal, Bitwarden or ProtonMail). When end-to-end encryption is activated on an account, the encryption key is derived from the user’s password inside their own browser and never leaves the device, meaning that even CL Corporate Affairs, in its capacity as platform operator, is technically incapable of accessing the encrypted content. The full framework is set out in the Privacy Policy and the Terms & Conditions.

End-to-end encryption that each user can activate, making confidentiality a property of the system itself rather than only a promise.

That conviction is sharpened by the dual position from which Compass is built. The founder is at once a public-affairs practitioner (knowing from the inside what confidentiality means in the daily work of the profession) and the designer of the tool, which puts him in a position to make confidentiality a cornerstone of the system itself, over and above a mere contractual clause. From that vantage point, the answer is clear: end-to-end encryption is the most robust guarantee that can be offered, more robust than any separation between corporate entities could provide. Once the user activates it, encrypted content cannot technically be read by anyone, including by the entity operating the platform. That guarantee covers what it encrypts, and no more: the fields kept outside its scope so the service can function — the list of tracked dossiers, the analytical scores — remain readable by the platform and are protected by the contractual commitment alone, as is any content sent to the AI at the moment it is sent. Both are set out precisely in the Privacy Policy.

Building Compass also means illustrating a quality that is, in many ways, fundamentally characteristic of public-affairs consulting: identifying the right opportunity, at the right time, and learning to seize the priorities of the political agenda the better to make them one’s own.

In this respect Compass has chosen to fully embrace the AI momentum, while inscribing it within a distinctly European framework. The platform relies on Mistral, the leading European AI player, and the optional processing by this tool runs under an API key held by a user — their own, or, for a member of a collaborative workspace who has not added one, their account manager’s — never under a key of ours, backed by servers hosted entirely within the EU. This choice represents a solution that is at once flexible, light, transparent, and respectful of the confidentiality requirements of the platform’s users, one that is part of a clear deontological and axiological commitment, which we intend to keep deepening and which we mean to embody.

Compass connects to the public APIs and data portals operated by the EU institutions themselves, rather than relying on commercial data resellers. The European Parliament Open Data Portal (data.europarl.europa.eu) provides procedure files, MEPs reference data, committee documents, and amendments tabled in committee, the same data that powers the Parliament’s own document gateway. The EU Publications Office (Cellar and EUR-Lex) exposes the full text of Commission proposals through the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) framework, including the XHTML form rendered by the EP’s CONVEX converter, allowing Compass to extract the recitals, articles and annexes of each proposal at the canonical level. The EU Transparency Register feeds the stakeholder mapping module with the full list of registered interest representatives, their financial disclosures and declared clients.

Documents are retrieved on demand when the user opens a dossier and refreshed via a daily background sync against the EU Legislative Observatory (OEIL). Each amendment is structured per canonical (Recital N, Article N, Annex X), so the user can position, comment, draft and amend at the level the legislator works on, not at the level of a flat PDF.

Roll-call votes. The Parliament’s own records, reached through HowTheyVote.eu, an open-source project that publishes them under the Open Database License, individual records under the Database Contents License.

Compass ingests this dataset and derives two aggregates from it: for each Member and each political group, the share of votes in favour, against and abstaining by subject, established on main, public votes only. Those aggregates are available under the Open Database License.

Direct integration with the EP Open Data Portal, the Publications Office (Cellar / EUR-Lex / ELI) and the Transparency Register. Roll-call votes via HowTheyVote.eu, open source and openly licensed. No commercial data broker.