I joined Luminance’s fast-growing Discovery team as a Product Specialist this year. Launched in 2018, Luminance’s Discovery platform uses AI to transform the process of eDiscovery and investigations and is now being deployed by some of the world’s leading law firms. In my role as a Product Specialist, I am ready to assist the lawyer at every stage of the eDiscovery process. This includes offering support during Luminance’s two-week trial period, where we give firms the chance to try out the technology on their own documents, to conducting on and off-site staff orientation sessions for our customers, as well as helping clients devise operational strategies for various projects. Customer demand for assistance is not something that has stopped during the COVID-19-imposed lockdown, with Luminance continuing to support all of its clients remotely. This is how I’m typically spending my days at the moment:

9am

I start my day with a cup of a coffee and call with a top-tier Swiss law firm who are about to begin a high-profile litigation case using Luminance Discovery. At this stage, the firm needs to identify the relevant documents through data culling. Luminance assists the process of data culling with a range of AI-based tools and widgets which help lawyers to cut down the data set to only what is relevant. Some of our customers might upload one-terabyte (around 18,750,000 documents), and find that only 50GB worth of documents are relevant for the case, so these tools are of critical importance to lawyers.

To expedite the eDiscovery process, it is important to take the time to discuss with clients a strategy for certain projects. This often involves defining the scope of the discovery, making sure data has been uploaded from the different sources and, last but not least, understanding the timescale that the review needs to be completed within. By the end of the call, everything is in place to ensure a smooth and seamless review process for the firm.

10:30am

I receive an email from a ‘Global Top 100’ law firm who have a high-volume litigation case which they want to start working on as soon as possible. It is not uncommon for law firms to suddenly take on cases which require urgent eDiscovery investigations, with firms having to upload and review enormous datasets as quickly as possible. This particular firm are looking to upload around 500GB worth of data. This was one reason why the firm chose Luminance: Luminance is primarily deployed in the cloud and requires no lengthy pre-training or user-onboarding - meaning lawyers can be using the system and uploading their documents within hours and from any location. In this case, the team were up-and-running on Luminance within 48 hours, ensuring a quick start on their document review.

11am

I run a training session with a mid-sized law firm who have recently upgraded to Luminance Discovery’s latest version, ‘5.0’, released at the beginning of April. My favourite bit of this is showing lawyers Luminance’s ability to cluster and find documents in conceptually similar groups- for example, if a lawyer is working on a fraud case and wants to find emails which mention a key individual, because Luminance actually forms an understanding of the documents, the system can instantly surface conceptually similar results to the lawyer- it’s a bit like magic working in front of you!

1pm

Time for lunch. I like to move as far away from my desk as possible- it’s good to have a break from staring at a laptop screen. At the moment, I have taken to listening to audio books during lunchtime, it really helps me to relax so that I come back to desk nice and refreshed.

2pm

I get a call from one of Luminance’s Legal Product Experts about a firm who would like to try Luminance for a two-week free trial period. This involves me setting a law firm up with Luminance to try on their own project or case, which we always think is the most useful way for lawyers to test the technology. This includes training sessions with the firm, providing a deep dive into Luminance’s functionalities and to flesh out features the firm may find useful during the project.

4pm

The two-week free trial for a leading railway company has come to an end and I take part in a final project meeting with the firm. During the two-week trial period, the legal team used Luminance Discovery for a DSAR (Data Subject Access Request) case. This is something we have a real demand for at the moment since the last few years have seen a lot of regulation around data privacy. The firm’s legal team have achieved amazing results- the DSAR was completed in just five days, a task predicted to have taken at least one month manually. As part of the final project meeting, we discuss the next steps going forward including implementing a firm-wide strategy for integration, as well as helping the legal team plan for an upcoming DSAR review.

6:15pm

I clock off just after six, ready for some downtime after another busy day. Before lockdown, this was a 15 minutes commute but now my evening starts right away! At the moment, I am doing an online coding course and it’s really fun developing my skills and knowledge.