I joined Luminance in early 2022 as a Legal Analyst intern after completing my bachelor’s degree in law at SOAS, University of London. Initially, I had wanted to qualify as a solicitor, but I became more and more interested in the idea of sitting at the intersection of law and technology where I could really exercise my creative and critical thinking skills. When I learned about the opportunity to intern as a Legal Analyst for a company at the forefront of AI and legal innovation, it seemed like the perfect starting point.

One year later and I’ve progressed from intern to team leader, working closely with our Cambridge-based tech teams to refine Luminance’s AI and provide feedback on the latest product developments. Here’s what a typical day in the life looks like for me.

9am

The Legal Analyst team is based out of Luminance’s London headquarters three days a week, so I head in early to prepare my to-do list and set the team’s priorities for the day. The Legal Analysts work collaboratively with lots of other teams across the business, whether that’s assessing the performance of Luminance’s AI alongside our Research & Development team, or auditing training data with our in-house legal department, so it really helps to have a few extra minutes in the morning to make sure I’m on top of all our different projects and conversations.

9:30am

I dial into the daily R&D priorities call led by Simon, Luminance’s CTO, and Graham, our Director of AI and Operations. We catch up on any new tech developments, what codes the R&D team are running and the progress of beta product features. As Legal Analysts, we provide a lot of product feedback to the R&D team, so the morning call is important in helping me understand our collective progress on key product developments.

10am

After our meeting, it’s time to get to work! A key component of the Legal Analyst role is refining Luminance’s out-of-the-box knowledge of contracts and clauses. This involves improving the quality and quantity of data used to improve our AI model.

This work is really at the core of what the Legal Analysts do and I’m currently working to improve Luminance’s pre-built knowledge of Non-Disclosure Agreements. Our legal team has helped us put together playbooks which set out how Luminance’s AI should tag each clause that it comes across in a contract. Our customers then have the option to use either this out-of-the-box knowledge on their contracts or to upload their own playbook. Even if a business prefers Luminance to negotiate according to internal precedents, we still need to make sure our AI has a strong pre-built understanding of what a clause looks like and what it means according to industry standards.

We go through the training data and tag each clause in line with our playbook, which is very detail-oriented work that requires lots of critical thinking. If we’re ever uncertain on how to tag a tricky clause then our General Counsel, Harry, is always on-hand to help out! The great thing about our role is that you’re always learning on-the-job and improving your own legal knowledge.

12pm

We run weekly internal product demos for newly released or upcoming features, so today I’m showing the tech teams two of the latest clauses we’ve recently trained Luminance’s AI to identify. I pull up a contract on my laptop and show how Luminance now automatically tags these clauses – despite it never having seen this document before! I also discuss how Luminance’s AI should understand these clauses during a contract negotiation and under what conditions it should flag them as either compliant or risky.

I have a few spare minutes at the end of the session, so I demonstrate some new Traffic Light Analysis (TLA) work that the Legal Analysts have been working on with Julio, Luminance’s Head of R&D. TLA is the term we use to describe how Luminance’s colour-codes a contract according to whether it’s compliant (green), in need of further review (amber) or risky (red). I pull up a demo contract and show everyone the improvements we’ve made to the accuracy with which Luminance flags risk. These weekly product demos are a great opportunity to show the wider tech teams new features prior to release and answer any questions they may have.

1pm

Time for lunch! Joe & The Juice is currently our favourite food spot, so we grab something there to eat before heading to St James’s Square to soak up some sun!

2pm

One of the most exciting parts of my job is getting to test out Luminance’s latest product features. This is a real full circle moment for me, as I get to see my work in practice! I work closely with the QA team to test the whole workflow of our Corporate product, simulating how an end user would interact with the platform and putting the system through its paces. This ranges from testing the UI (user interface) and UX (user experience), but today I’m trialling Luminance’s negotiation functionality.

I upload a contract to Luminance and ensure it’s working as expected, with the AI accurately colour-coding areas of risk and non-compliance in each paragraph. My perspective as an end-user with legal knowledge is really important in helping the tech team to collate feedback on platform usability and efficacy, meaning we can provide the best possible offering for our customers.

3:30pm

For the rest of the afternoon, I’m working on our latest product feature: Ask Lumi. This is an AI-powered chatbot which can provide instant answers to natural language questions about a contract. I work on creating a dataset of questions and ‘gold standard’ answers for a set of contracts. These are used to compare the outputs of the models, which our R&D team then tweaks to improve the output. I score and give feedback on the latest chatbot model that David, our Senior Research Architect, has been working on.

6pm

Time to close my laptop after a busy day! For me there’s nothing better to clearing the head than a bit of fresh air and exercise, so I head out for a post-work run in the park.

Luminance is looking for Junior Legal Analysts to join its dynamic team located in London. Interested in applying? Check out our careers page here.