CLCorporate Affairs Consulting

CL Corporate Affairs Consulting is an independent public affairs consultancy designing advocacy and influence strategies for organisations operating in sensitive and/or strongly regulated sectors, particularly in high-stakes environments. It operates primarily before the institutions of the European Union and across its Member States, with proven experience in France, Luxembourg and Italy, and a particular focus on reputational risk issues facing organisations confronted with complex political, regulatory and social environments.

That focus is not incidental. The clients typically advised by the firm operate in sectors that face heightened public scrutiny (from regulators, public opinion, the media, political stakeholders), in a way that is structurally more demanding than the average industry. Working day in, day out with organisations exposed to that level of attention shapes a particular professional discipline: transparency, credibility and confidentiality are not abstract values in this practice, they are the ordinary conditions of the job. This exposure has come to be regarded not as a liability of the trade, but as an apprenticeship in what a principled engagement with public decision-makers actually requires.

Transparency, credibility and confidentiality are not abstract values in this practice. They are the ordinary conditions of the job.

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 Consulting’s own expertise into a piece of infrastructure offered to the wider community — in a logic of professional cooperation within a competitive ecosystem. Compass is conceived as an act of practical solidarity among peers: even when practitioners operate in different sectors of activity, what unites them is a shared awareness of the deontological rules that frame the public affairs craft, and the daily constraints they impose.

It follows that access to the platform is not unconditional. Compass is granted in strict compliance with the ethical rules of the public affairs profession, and subject to compatibility with the engagements of CL Corporate Affairs Consulting 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 a restriction but the condition of the platform’s credibility — an outsider who is also a peer would have no reason to trust the tool if its operator failed to honour, in this respect, the rules that govern the public affairs community as a whole.

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

This matters because 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.

The same exposure to heightened scrutiny that defines the consultancy’s practice (see above) 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. The deontological constraint is, in this sense, a feature of the product, not a hurdle around it.

The deontological 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 deontological standards of the profession. 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 Consulting, 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 — and so knows from the inside what confidentiality means in the daily work of the profession — and the engineer who designed the tool, in a position to make that confidentiality a property of the system itself, over and above a mere clause in a contract. From that vantage point, the answer is clear: end-to-end encryption is the most robust guarantee we can offer, more robust than any separation between corporate entities could provide. Once the user activates it, the question of which activity CL is conducting at any given moment becomes irrelevant — the encrypted content cannot be read, by anyone, including by the entity operating the platform and the consultancy.

Building Compass also means seizing a moment that is itself, in many ways, characteristic of the profession: in public affairs, identifying the right opportunity at the right time is part of the craft. The current acceleration of artificial intelligence is one such opportunity, and Compass embraces it — while inscribing it within a distinctly European, principled framework. The platform’s AI scope is deliberately restricted to Mistral, the European AI provider, and the user chooses between two configurations: a Mistral model running locally on their own computer via Ollama (zero data transfer, the maximum-privacy option), or Mistral’s European commercial API (EU infrastructure in France and Sweden, no use of customer data for model training). No OpenAI, no Anthropic, no non-European provider — today nor tomorrow.

Mistral, two flavours: locally on the user’s machine, or via the European Mistral API. No OpenAI, no Anthropic, no non-European provider.

Compass connects to the public APIs and data portals operated by the EU institutions themselves, rather than relying on intermediaries. 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.

Direct integration with the EP Open Data Portal, the Publications Office (Cellar / EUR-Lex / ELI) and the Transparency Register — no scraping intermediary, no third-party data broker.