Contracts are a vital part of building relationships and completing business transactions. Nonetheless, the sheer number of contracts firms must keep track of, from non-disclosure agreements to employment contracts, means that these documents often lack uniformity and are difficult to organise, manage, and update. Whether it be small companies who are under-resourced and so have little time to spend comparing contract clauses with their agreed wording, or multinational, global organisations who are executing hundreds of contracts by the week, lawyers are turning to Luminance’s AI to assist them throughout the process of contract analysis.

The contract conundrum facing businesses

Contracts represent each and every company’s past successes, current obligations and future opportunities, and to that end, provide the very foundation of how a business operates. Yet, as businesses grow, build relationships with new suppliers, partners and customers, the number of contracts that an average business is creating and executing is ever-increasing. What’s more, the terms negotiated with each vendor will often vary significantly, building up further complexity within contract sets.

However, organisations commonly lack the tools to immediately understand or review the intricacies of their various contracts. Indeed, it goes without saying that the majority of contracts are incredibly complex, with multiple appendices, addenda and elaborate terms setting out a range of hypothetical scenarios. This means that, if, for instance, a large manufacturing company finds itself with an enormous volume of procurement contracts that all have different renewal dates and renegotiation terms, it would require hundreds of hours and an unfathomable amount of resources for a legal team to review and track all this information to ensure that no renewal or opportunity is missed.

Keeping consistency with Luminance

Luminance provides a real solution to this problem, with powerful machine learning technology that is able to immediately read and form an understanding of vast datasets, instantly surfacing crucial information such as clauses, datapoints and anomalies following document upload. This mean that, within a matter of seconds, Luminance would be able to identify a crucial ‘Confidentiality’ or ‘Renewal’ clause, enabling firms to have a greater understanding of individual contract clauses and gain a holistic understanding of their contractual landscape.

Luminance builds on this with its Automatic Document and Clause Compliance technology. This unique feature allows users to select a ‘model’ document or clause against which all others are compared. Luminance is then able to run an extra layer of analysis throughout the dataset in order to highlight clauses or documents that deviate from this standard- for instance Luminance would be able to highlight the ways in which renewal dates that vary, or show subtle discrepancies in language for a particular ‘Termination’ clause. Not only does this allow legal teams to quickly understand the parameters of obligations in existing contracts, but this can provide consistency and compliance when negotiating and approving future contracts.

By synchronising with Microsoft Word, users can then access their Word documents from within the Luminance platform and apply the analysis from Luminance’s AI in order to remediate and modify documents. All changes can be saved with a click of a button and reviewers can then continue their analysis in Luminance, vastly expediting the review process.

Manage critical risk

With many companies suffering from the economic fallout arising from the Covid-19 pandemic and as well as increasing regulation, Luminance provides organisations with an opportunity to mitigate potential contractual risk. Luminance can be used to identify, for instance, all examples of force majeure clauses across entire datasets. Users can then ensure that, where applicable, there is a standardised ‘force majeure’ clause across certain contracts. This is crucial in ensuring transparency and certainty in the event that such a clause is triggered.

Seamless review process

With businesses now operating on a global level, it is often the case that legal teams may be reviewing documents which are written in multiple languages and work across several jurisdictions. Luminance’s seamless language-and jurisdiction-agnostic technology is invaluable, with the platform immediately analysing and working with any given dataset. In fact, one of Luminance’s customers, leading German law firm Gleiss Lutz, recently used Luminance to conduct a multilingual review of over 17 languages, including English, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese and German.

What’s more, Luminance’s advanced collaboration features, including the ability to assign documents or tasks to team members, share findings through ‘Notes’ and other reporting features and track work progression, allows users to work across teams, offices and time-zones.

Increasing contractual efficiency with Luminance

Working faster and smarter means using the right and most effective tools. Luminance’s powerful machine learning platform is business-critical for every modern enterprise, allowing them to mitigate potential risk and drive efficiency in every aspect of the contracting processes.