The best lawyers are always on the lookout for new ways to provide quality legal advice, delivered with as much insight and analysis as possible. These lawyers, in turn, not only tend to learn faster and receive more work, but also advance their own career at a quicker pace. In today’s legal sector – and particularly in the difficult business climate that we all operate in - that often means making effective use of advanced technology. Using Luminance’s cutting-edge AI tools, lawyers are able to conduct comprehensive document reviews quickly and cost effectively, benefiting both their firms and themselves.

Becoming an AI-adept lawyer

As lawyers look for ways to make themselves indispensable for their teams and their clients, AI presents an obvious solution. Luminance uses a unique blend of cutting-edge supervised and unsupervised machine learning which can read and form an understanding of all documents within a dataset, allowing lawyers to cut through large data volumes to rapidly identify key documents and provisions which are pertinent to the matter at hand. As Mason Clark, associate at Ice Miller puts it, “Luminance saves the lawyer from sifting through information that the lawyer already knows… [instead Luminance] allows the lawyer to find what they don’t know.” Because Luminance helps lawyers to identify all of the key information, they can instead focus their work on the higher-value tasks such as analysing what this means for their client, and providing advice drawn from these comprehensive data insights.

Indeed, for Dr. Artur-Konrad Wypych, Associate at leading firm Bird & Bird, AI has been a key tool for his firm and for his own work. As he put it, “leveraging AI at Bird & Bird is not only increasing our competitive advantage, but I am also personally able to see how technology will enable me to advance in my career.” With AI-powered document review, lawyers can not only look to cut costs in terms of labour required on each project but also, because of the time savings Luminance generates, can actually maximise the value of their time by taking on additional projects that they would have otherwise not been able to undertake. This increases young lawyers’ exposure to a wider variety of projects, clients and colleagues, helping them to learn faster and develop a depth of experience that would otherwise take years to build.

Benefiting from AI doesn’t always have to require talented lawyers to take up computer science, however. Although many legacy technologies have in the past required extensive pre-training (of both the technology and the user!), Luminance needs no pre-training or configuration – in fact, most customers typically begin their review within hours of deployment.

The challenging economic climate resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the importance for lawyers of gaining that competitive edge. Pay cuts, hiring freezes and redundancies have been announced at many firms, large and small, as well as within in-house legal teams. Reed Smith, for instance, recently announced the loss of 19 roles at its London office while DWF has announced it is closing offices in Brussels and Singapore. In this environment, it is those lawyers who have well-honed skills of analysis and judgement rather than practice of trawling through documents and marking them up, who will succeed

Preparing to succeed in the legal sector of the future

For junior lawyers starting out in the legal sector the challenge of setting themselves apart from their peers is often daunting. Once again, familiarising themselves with AI and integrating it into their work to enable lawyers to maximise their efficiency and work as a ‘business enabler’ can hold the key. As Gavin Williams, Partner at Holland & Knight, and co-chair of Associate mentoring for the firm’s Miami office noted, “If a younger associate is helping you go out into the marketplace and bring more business in, you bet they distinguish themselves from someone who isn’t.” Junior lawyers who are capable of using AI not only increase the efficiency of their work but can then work across extra projects with the time-savings that technology delivers is beneficial to both lawyer and law firm. In recognition of this, to help provide future lawyers with the skills they will need to succeed, the University of Glasgow recently teamed up with top-tier Scottish law firm, Burness Paull and Luminance, to provide an e-learning module as part of the University’s Postgraduate Law.

At Luminance, we have seen the real value AI has in supporting lawyers in their careers, improving the quality of their reviews and enabling them to deliver value through greater efficiency and improved longer-term, valuable client relationships.