There was an electrifying atmosphere at last week’s annual Legal Geek conference in London. This was not only due to the huge crowd of legal professionals and tech innovation experts in attendance, but also the great sense of excitement in the air. A technological legal transformation is taking place, supercharging the way lawyers work and the way they deliver their legal services.

Underpinning this transformation is the fusion of the new and the traditional. By this, I mean leveraging cutting-edge technology to accelerate the type of legal review that has been carried out by lawyers for centuries. From boutique firms to large law firms, to in-house teams, the need to be ‘tech fluent’ is essential for both the productivity and progression of the legal sector.

Adding value to legal services through AI solutions was a central theme at Legal Geek, and something I discussed with Torsten Torpe, Head of Legal Innovation at the internationally renowned Danish firm, Bech-Bruun. As one of Luminance’s first customers, Bech-Bruun has had first-hand experience of using our Legal Inference Transformation Engine (LITE) to enhance legal processes. The technology’s ability to read and understand any language and then expose areas of importance or risk, tailored to the advisor’s specific needs, is an essential tool. Indeed, in an ever-changing and competitive legal landscape, this is all the more necessary.

In our discussion, we looked at how Bech-Bruun had carried out a particularly complex M&A due diligence review concerning over 30,000 documents. With only one lawyer allocated to conduct the review, Torsten was adamant that without the Luminance platform, completing this exercise in its entirety would have been near impossible.

Time, cost and manpower constraints are struggles that are not exclusive to leading firms like Bech-Bruun. Yet, high volume, high risk legal work is something advisors no longer have to shy away from. Using Luminance, the little setup and configuration time enables lawyers to have a very instant, visual oversight of the dataset on day one of their review. From then, Luminance’s core technology, LITE, builds its understanding of the documentation through its interactions with the advisor to determine what is important. This brings new possibilities for lawyers. By accelerating the legal process, work previously thought to be too costly, too resource-intensive, or too high-volume in nature, can be completed. Even better, this work is completed with the utmost confidence that nothing has been missed.

For junior lawyers, often crippled by admin-heavy work, sophisticated technology enables them to add value to their work by redirecting their time to more meaningful tasks. Torsten echoed this, “You should not be afraid of something that makes junior lawyers better off, makes them more present and engages them more quickly than ever before”.

The value of legal services is taking on a new dimension. Legal Tech puts the advisors back in the driving seat and accelerates the legal process in a way that the legal profession has been waiting for. This is innovation at its finest.