Luminance recently spoke with Dominque Monette, a Legal Technology Applications Lawyer at leading Canadian law firm, Stikeman Elliott LLP. Dominique provided some insights on how this top-tier firm are using Luminance to accelerate their contract review processes and the need to promote technology through clients.

Luminance: Stikeman Elliott has been a Luminance customer for 2 years now- why did your firm decide to adopt Luminance?

Dominique: A key reason why Stikeman Elliott decided to adopt Luminance is because the platform is language-agnostic. As a leading Canadian firm, our lawyers are often working with multilingual documents, mostly English and French, therefore having the technology in place to support this was crucial. We were also impressed with how easy and intuitive Luminance is to use- the visual dashboard screen gives it that extra ‘wow’.

Luminance: Please can you explain how Stikeman Elliott has used Luminance to enhance legal workflow?

Dominique: Luminance is part of our lawyers’ toolbox and has been used to support processes such as M&A due diligence, whilst also assisting with other types of contract reviews like the review of employment contracts or the analysis of underwriting agreements. Of course, there are a lot of contract automation tools out there, but we appreciate the way Luminance will analyse clauses rather than simply extracting them to generate a report. Therefore, as well as being very visually attractive, Luminance gives the lawyer more information than they could ever have hoped for.

Luminance: Do your clients know or expect that you are using technology like Luminance on their reviews?

Dominique: Our clients expect that as a leading law firm, we will be using the latest technologies like Luminance. At Stikeman Elliott, we believe that the technology should help both our lawyers and our clients. Talking to our clients about how a technology like Luminance can help them with their contract analysis challenges is a win-win for both the client and our lawyers. By educating our clients, we create a ‘domino effect’ on tech adoption, with clients then asking us to use technologies like Luminance on their files.

Luminance: At Stikeman Elliott, I understand that you have flexible fee arrangements, including pricing options which reflect your firm’s use of automation tools on a project. Can you explain to me how that works?

Dominique: Pricing automated legal work is relatively new for many lawyers and clients so communication is key – especially around the concept of value. We need to ask what impact technology and automation will have on the speed of delivery and quality of the work product. By addressing these questions, lawyers and clients can have a meaningful dialogue about the value automation brings to a given mandate and the appropriate way to develop win-win pricing structures that align with the goals of both lawyers and clients. The co-managing partner in our Toronto office, Anne Ristic, goes into this in detail in a post from earlier this year which is a great starting point for understanding the challenges of pricing automation.

Dominique Monette is a Legal Technology Applications Lawyer at Stikeman Elliott LLP. In her role, Dominique is responsible for managing pilots of new technologies and for capturing requirements to design, author and build solutions to meet client needs by using the firm’s existing and potential legal technologies.