Over recent years, the legal industry across the APAC region has been ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing new technology. From the transition to virtual hearings in Malaysia to Japan’s recent bill to have virtual-only civil court procedures and the Singapore government’s announcement of the Technology and Innovation Roadmap to promote legal technology adoption, the APAC region has shown itself to be at the forefront of legal innovation.

As law firms and organisations in the region enter this new era of technology adoption, Kenneth Lie, Luminance’s Regional Director for APAC, recently hosted a webinar to discuss how next-generation AI is helping legal professionals to manage workflows, get rapid answers to urgent business questions and uphold compliance.

The Challenges

Against a backdrop of exploding data volumes and increased regulation, maintaining compliance poses one of the biggest challenges to legal teams and businesses across the APAC region today. Just one example is India’s long-debated Personal Data Protection Bill (PDPB), which is expected to result in a significant new compliance burden for e-commerce businesses in the coming year. In addition to the growing list of compliance responsibilities, the region has also bucked the global trend and experienced a record number of IPOs in Q1 of this year. With such a huge increase in public offerings and transactional work post-Covid, organisations can no longer rely on ‘manual’ methods of review or outdated contract lifecycle management systems that risk missing critical information and risk during contract negotiation and review.

Automating Legal Processes with Luminance Corporate

To tackle these challenges, Luminance’s AI-powered legal process automation tool, Luminance Corporate, is helping organisations to enhance and expedite the entire contract lifecycle process. Key features of the platform that allow in-house legal teams to instantly understand the compliance of incoming contracts and the key features of their contractual landscape include:

• Traffic Light Analysis – Luminance is the first AI in the world capable of taking a first pass review of an incoming contract out-of-the-box. Via a colour-coding system, Luminance will automatically highlight which clauses within a contract are acceptable (green), worth reviewing (amber) or non-compliant (red) based on what the organisation has agreed to previously. This allows lawyers to instantly understand where to focus resource within seconds, reducing reliance on the time-consuming and outdated practice of manually redlining contracts.

• Maintain Compliance with Suggested Wording - Where terms may differ from previously agreed wording, Luminance will suggest alternative, acceptable wording suggestions from previously agreed contracts, and with just one click, users can insert previously approved wording into new contracts under negotiation. Crucially, Luminance’s supervised machine learning means the technology will learn from every interaction between the user and Luminance and apply it to future negotiations.

• Legal Process Automation Tools – Luminance’s AI-powered Workflow Editor gives in-house legal teams complete overview of the flow of contracts around the organisation. Conditions can be put in place to assign a hierarchical flow of contracts, meaning that an organisation can ensure all contracts pertaining to anti-bribery laws are, for example, automatically sent to the ESG team for review whilst contracts changed more than 50% by the counterparty are directed to senior members of the legal team for detailed review.

• AI-Powered Understanding of Executed Contracts - With Luminance, lawyers can rapidly organise, understand and compare all contracts in their organisation, whether under negotiation or executed. AI-powered search automatically highlights key information within documents, such as clauses, dates, parties and governing laws. This analysis is displayed back to the user across a series of interactive widgets, allowing lawyers to understand their contractual landscape and respond to business questions with clarity and speed.

AI In Action: PSL Advocates & Solictors

PSL Advocates & Solicitors is an Indian disputes practice headquartered in New Delhi. The firm was tasked with an urgent, high-profile arbitration being conducted under the aegis of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre. With 750,000 documents to review, just three lawyers dedicated to the dispute and the preliminary estimate of damages for the claim standing at £38 million, PSL decided to deploy Luminance’s AI to expedite the review, using the technology’s unique conceptual understanding of documentation to get to the heart of the matter quicker. For instance, when PSL found an example of a respondent breaching an agreement, by selecting ‘Find Similar’, Luminance was able to locate all other relevant documents where the respondent had breached the agreement. Using Luminance, the team completed their investigation in just four weeks, achieving 75% time-savings.

Click here to access the full webinar, or request a demonstration of Luminance’s powerful legal process automation technology here.