I joined Luminance as a Legal Product Expert in 2018 as part of the Diligence sales team. At Luminance, we offer a two-week free pilot for all prospective customers, allowing lawyers to understand the impact the technology can have upon their own document set, during which time we offer ongoing training sessions and the war room assistance that we offer to all live customers. Late last year, I was made a Product Specialist to assist with Luminance's fast-growing customer base, now spanning over 200 law firms and organisations in 47 countries. This is what a typical day looks like for me:

5am

I have a (delightful!) early morning start to catch a flight to Rome. Today, I am due to complete a pilot training session with an Italian law firm. It is really important that a member of Luminance’s pilot team is on hand to answer any questions lawyers may have when they are first using the technology. Luminance is a very intuitive platform, but showing users the breadth of the platform is really crucial to ensuring they understand how to get the best out of the technology in terms of insights and efficiencies.

6am

On my way to the airport, I check my emails and messages. A sales rep from the Luminance Diligence team has informed me that after completing a demonstration of Luminance, a Global ‘Top 100’ law firm would like to conduct a two-week pilot. I schedule a pilot planning call with the sales rep, the project manager at the firm and me to discuss logistics and agree the assessment criteria. Every pilot is tailored specifically to the firm’s use case and team workflow. I also inform Luminance’s tech team, who will provide the firm with a private instance of Luminance so that the lawyers can upload their own documents. Running a pilot is always a team effort so keeping all these people in the loop ensures a smooth piloting process.

8am

Whilst I am waiting for my flight, I am notified of a technical issue relating to an Indian law firm who are currently in their second week of a pilot. Our technical team offer 24/7 support, so happily this issue is quickly resolved.

11am

After landing in Rome, I head straight to my first pilot training session at a leading Italian law firm. They have already been given a demo of Luminance’s technology, however in this session, I give an extended demo to a team of 30 lawyers to familiarise them with the technology. I then go through some training exercises with the lawyers on a ‘dummy’ set of documents. Luminance is very easy to use, so it is not long before the lawyers are surfacing ‘Change of Control’ clauses in the documents and ‘tagging’ the contracts where they see fit.

12pm

Now the legal team have got comfortable with using the platform, I get the team of lawyers to upload their own contracts for a live deal they are working on. There are some concerns from a few of the lawyers about whether Luminance will be able to comprehensively read and understand the contracts they are working with; the documents are unique to their use case and the vast majority are poorly scanned. This is not a problem - Luminance’s LITE (Legal Inference Transformation Engine) combines a complex blend of proprietary and open source OCR components to read any documents. In fact, Luminance’s import system can actively improve scan quality and faults, allowing the legal team to instantly read the document set. By deploying machine learning, LITE learns from the lawyers’ interactions with the platform to uncover crucial insights to the team. Luminance’s workflow and project management tools are then used to delegate tasks to team members.

1:30pm

I finish the training session and bid my farewells to the law firm. Product training is split into two sessions so tomorrow I will carry out the second part and will focus on guiding lawyers as they begin reviewing the documents for the live deal. Key to this is empowering lawyers to complete the review more efficiently and with more insight when compared to manual review methods.

1:45pm

I grab a sandwich in a café and I check my emails. I have just received some feedback from a Dutch insurance firm who have completed the first week of their pilot. This is known as a ‘Mid-Pilot Review’, which gives pilot users a chance to tell us any initial responses they have, allowing us to assist them as best as we can in their second week of the pilot. This particular firm have already completed one project and are looking to upload another project to Luminance.

2:30pm

One of our customers is just down the road from me, so I pop in to conduct a training session. This is not uncommon - as pilot specialists we can be called on to answer any questions, as well as providing extra one-to-one refresher training sessions on a specific functionality, or to lawyers who haven’t used the technology before.

4:30pm

Another law firm have recently wrapped up their two-week pilot. I meet up with the firm’s sales rep, and we head to the firm to have the Final-Pilot meeting onsite. We present the results of the pilot back to the firm and discuss next steps.

6:30pm

I head to my hotel, exhausted but in high spirits after a long day. It is exciting to see so many firms using technology to accelerate due diligence review. It is time for dinner in Rome!