AI is going to “transform the way we work”. It’s a phrase we’re all familiar with by now. The naysayers will warn that the robots are taking over, but the changes I see are much more positive than that. Think less drudgery, more efficiency, and empowered employees.

Luminance has been helping lawyers for more than five years now, automating the routine, tedious tasks that can take up so much of their time. But recently, I’ve noticed a shift in the ways that organisations are looking to integrate our AI into their day-to-day operations. Businesses are increasingly keen to extend Luminance’s AI beyond their legal departments to their non-legal functions, easing bottlenecks and speeding up the commercial process. Let’s take a look at some of the ways our AI is helping different teams across the business.

Demystifying Contracts

From Sales and Procurement to Finance and Marketing, every business function interacts with contracts on a daily basis. Think of the time that could be saved if non-legal teams were able to manage these themselves, rather than having to turn to their legal department for a detailed review of every contract the company generates or signs. Well, Luminance’s customisable contract generation technology does just that, allowing any business function to draft their own contracts from approved templates created by the legal team.

Let’s imagine the sales team wants to get an NDA back to a prospective customer. Rather than sending it off to Legal, waiting for them to review it, and returning it back to the customer, sales can now use an approved template do this themselves, capitalising on the momentum and not losing any business to inefficient processes.

And it’s not just the generation of contracts, we’re actually giving teams the ability to review and negotiate them too. In September, Luminance released ‘Self-Serve’ specifically designed with the aim of empowering colleagues from across the business to negotiate and amend third party contracts in line with internal standards. With this latest feature, Luminance will give an instant summary of any risky clauses, highlight the parts that need amending, and suggest alternative, compliant wording which can be applied in a click! If anything looks to be too risky or non-standard, one click and employees can send it to Legal for a further check.

Company-Wide Collaboration

It’s not just contract management. Non-legal teams constantly have legal queries: “Is this confidential?”, “Do we have clients in this country?”, “When does this supplier agreement expire?”, the list goes on! Luminance’s contract repository acts as a single source of truth for an organisation’s entire document landscape. This means that all employees can have any commercial insight at their fingertips, rather than always having to turn to Legal for the answer.

Even more so now that ‘Ask Lumi’, our legal chatbot, is available within the contract repository, providing answers to any contract query in seconds. This means:

a) Non-legal teams can use it to understand contracts, immediately identify key information and be more aware of the business’ legal activity.

b) The legal department is saved from answering routine, repetitive queries and can focus their time on the creative and strategic work that truly demands their expertise.

And for those trickier agreements where colleagues do end up needing Legal’s help, Luminance’s Legal Helpdesk automates legal query handling. Via a simple ticketing system, non-legal teams can make legal requests or pose questions, doing away with lengthy email chains and siloed contracting processes. Take Koch Industries – they use this function to enable Sales and Procurement teams to clarify internal legal standards or ask questions. It's massively eased legal bottlenecks and streamlined workflows across the company!

Ultimately, Luminance is unique in its ability to bring AI to every touchpoint a business has with its contracts. Any function interacting with legal documents (i.e. most!) can reap the benefits. With more and more forward-thinking companies recognising this game-changing opportunity, ‘AI-powered businesses’ represent a new, more efficient chapter in the workplace.