This week, we sat down with Harry Borovick, General Counsel at Luminance, to chat about how his own team use Luminance’s AI to automate their legal processes, the evolution of legal technology and what’s at the top of the business agenda for his fellow GCs.

Q: As GC of Luminance, you have the company’s next-generation AI at your fingertips. How do you and your team use Luminance on a daily basis?

Harry: My team handle a lot of time-sensitive documents, so we use Luminance’s Legal Helpdesk – the platform’s in-built legal query handling system – to track who is working on what, communicate questions about problematic contracts or terms internally, and ensure everything that arrives into our inbox is handled quickly and efficiently.

More recently, we’ve started utilising Luminance’s Traffic Light Analysis (TLA) to take a first pass review of incoming contracts. This has been a real game changer. Luminance’s AI will instantly highlight which words, clauses or paragraphs within a contract are acceptable (green), in need of review (amber) or non-compliant (red) based on our own standards. This has completely transformed the way we review and negotiate NDAs, MSAs and other contracts across the business.

We also house all of the company’s contracts in Luminance. With our documents centrally located in Luminance’s AI-powered repository; we can conduct intelligent searches across our entire contractual landscape. Within the repository itself, one of the most exciting features for us has been using Luminance’s tagging functionality. We’ve been able to create bespoke tags to better understand our contractual data. For instance, we can tag our sales contracts for upsell opportunities and upgrade our customers to the latest version of Luminance.

Q: How does Luminance impact other parts of the business?

Harry: It’s definitely been a game changer for our sales teams. For example, we use Luminance’s alert system to ensure that we’re automatically notified when contracts are up for expiry and renewal so we can capitalise on these opportunities. My team will then notify the relevant Account Executive who begins the process of renewing customer contracts with plenty of time to spare.

Our Sales Team can also now draft compliant standard contracts like NDAs with Luminance’s automated contract generation tool. This eliminates legal bottlenecks and makes sure that our lean legal team isn’t bogged down in drafting standardised agreements!

Q: The legal team is a busy bunch; how does Luminance ensure effective collaboration and knowledge-sharing across your team?

Harry: Luminance has allowed us to essentially build a live and intelligent playbook that we can refer to during contract negotiations. If I’m ever out of the office, my trainee solicitors can simply use Luminance to access our precedent banks and make a decision based on our past decisions. Another huge plus is that Luminance learns on-the-fly, becoming more bespoke with continued use and adapting as our own internal standards change according to market conditions or new regulation. This learning is then retained by Luminance’s AI, so it will highlight non-standard clauses during future contracts negotiations.

Q: What do you think is the most exciting aspect of AI for legal teams?

Harry: No one goes into the legal profession hoping to fill their day with routine administrative and review work – they go into the legal sector to practise law! It’s as a simple as this: Luminance’s AI enables lawyers to do ‘real lawyering’ and use the years of knowledge they’ve accumulated during law school, as a paralegal or apprentice. As a junior lawyer, I think I missed out on key learning opportunities because I was doing countless hours of labour-intensive review work instead of focusing on higher-value tasks like applying my own critical and creative thinking to a matter. With Luminance, that rite of passage simply doesn’t have to be the case anymore.

Q: How has legal tech evolved during your time as a lawyer?

Harry: If you can believe it, fax used to be a key technology for lawyers – how times have changed! In fact, early in my legal career, Word and Excel were also considered to be ‘legal tech’. Now they’re simply seen as non-negotiables in the workplace. eDiscovery tools and virtual data rooms have been around for a while, but the introduction of next-generation AI like Luminance has completely changed the game. Plus, the scale of AI adoption now is really unlike anything I’ve seen before in the sector. For example, we recently announced that Koch, the second largest private organisation in the US, will be using Luminance across their 300-person legal team, plus their non-legal teams. It’s incredibly exciting to see how legal tech isn’t just for Legal anymore!

Q: What is your favourite part of being a GC at a legal tech company?

Harry: I’m in a really unique and fortunate position because I have the opportunity to apply my knowledge of the law and legal processes to actually develop Luminance’s product roadmap. In fact, because we use Luminance on a daily basis, our legal team acts as an internal feedback loop when it comes to trying out new features. Cross-team collaboration is incredibly important here at Luminance.

Q: What do you chat about with fellow GCs? What’s at the top of their agendas?

Harry: Besides Arnie, my dachshund, who makes frequent appearances in Luminance’s office, we chat about the latest developments in the legal sector, how the sector is evolving and what the future looks like for lawyers! There are definitely shared concerns when it comes to challenges like maintaining compliance with evolving regulations and the current uncertainty caused by growing economic headwinds, but there’s also plenty of optimism. Shifting mindsets mean that there are more and more in-house lawyers embracing AI technology and seeing the tremendous value it brings to their teams when it comes tackling these new challenges.

To learn more here about why Luminance is trusted by over 500 companies including Koch Industries and Liberty Mutual to automate and augment the entire legal process.