Earlier this week, Luminance’s CEO, Eleanor Weaver attended Enterprise GC, the two-day event hosted by The Legal 500. The summit brings together over 100 GCs and senior legal counsel from leading organisations across the UK, providing the opportunity for open and honest discussion about the trends and issues impacting in-house legal professionals and the businesses they represent.

For Luminance, the event also provided an apt opportunity to showcase our latest AI-powered product, Luminance Corporate, to a room full of GCs who all had innovation at the forefront of their mind. And after an unprecedented couple of years characterised by mass upheaval, whether that be the pandemic, remote workforces, increased regulation and, now, economic sanctions, business leaders were in agreement that next-generation technology is playing an ever more important role in helping them tackle these challenges.

i. Ease-of-Use and Adoption is Key

It is no secret that in-house counsel face increasing demands on their time. The role of the GC in particular has evolved over the last decade, and today they are seen as business enablers charged with managing risk and compliance as well as formulating business strategy. When it comes to technology adoption, the summit made clear that ease-of-use and deployment is key. Legal teams don’t have the time to spend training, onboarding and learning how to use new technology. AI like Luminance that can be deployed into an organisation within minutes and acts as a natural extension of a lawyer is essential in an environment in which technology must be understood and assimilated by users almost instantly. This is all the more pertinent in an unpredictable world, where new regulatory requirements and global sanctions like those we have seen over recent months present overnight challenges for organisations.

As Eleanor Weaver, Luminance’s CEO, noted during her session: “Despite AI as a term entering the mainstream, the majority of tech companies still use legacy rule-based systems – that is certainly not artificial intelligence. We’re hearing from our customers more and more just how valuable Luminance’s AI is when they find themselves in unforeseen scenarios... only true AI will be able to adapt automatically, without the need for lengthy manual training.”

ii. In-House Teams Want a One-Stop-Shop Technology

Another key theme that emerged over the course of the event was the desire for a one-stop-shop solution to a whole host of issues. Particularly for those organisations that have implemented point solutions in the past which aim to solve very specific problems, there has been a realisation that these systems lack synchronicity with others, and there is now a greater desire for a single, end-to-end technology that expedites all aspects of the contract lifecycle. This is where AI plays an essential role. Whether drafting an employment agreement from a template, reviewing an NDA to automatically check that all terms meet internal standards, searching your entire contract database to demonstrate ESG credentials, or assigning workflows to manage the flow of contracts within your business, all of this can be done within one streamlined platform, avoiding the need for an unwieldy, siloed tech stack.

iii. Now is the Time for Innovation

One thing that attendees were in agreement on was the pressures being universally felt across the in-house legal community. Pain points vary from vertical to vertical, yet there were a few that remained consistent: the ever-increasing volume of legal content in need of review, pressure to uphold compliance with internal standards as well as external laws and regulations, and the need to facilitate remote collaboration across offices and geographies. There was a consensus that AI has become a key component for in-house legal teams looking to cut the time spent on arduous legal processing work, leaving more time to focus on high value work that allows GCs to drive business growth, maintain compliance and gain a competitive advantage in negotiations.

Introducing Luminance Corporate

The marquee event also provided a perfect opportunity for Eleanor Weaver and Luminance’s Subject Matter Expert, Luke Taylor, to demonstrate Luminance Corporate which uses AI to automate the review, negotiation and workflow of live contracts. In fact, Luminance is the first AI in the world capable of taking a first-pass review of incoming contracts out-of-the-box, colour-coded clauses according to compliance (or otherwise) and suggesting alternative compliant wording for areas that present risk. With huge demand for the product, Luminance has seen a 75% increase in its customer base in 2022 alone, with customers including UK supermarket, Tesco, global confectionary company, Ferrero, and South American flagship airline, Avianca.

If you’d like to learn more about Luminance Corporate, request a demonstration of the technology here or check out our Events page to find out when Luminance will be in a city near you.