9 February 2021- Adopting AI is crucial for the future of the legal industry say top legal experts during this year’s virtual LegalWeek conference.

Speaking on a panel hosted by leading legal AI company Luminance, representatives from Ernst & Young (EY) Law USA, Global ‘Top 100’ law firm Mayer Brown, and the world’s largest law firm, Dentons, discussed why AI adoption is front and centre of their business strategy. Tanja Podinic, Assistant General Counsel at Dentons, pointed towards a trend of increasingly ‘tech-savvy’ incoming trainees and junior lawyers expecting a certain level of technology adoption as standard, explaining that “We are being asked by junior lawyers ‘what technology are you using?’, ‘will we will be exposed to it?’, ‘how often will we be using it?’”. Because of this, Tanja Podinic believes advanced technology is essential in attracting the best and brightest candidates: “We need to make sure that we are adopting technology like Luminance because the upcoming generation are expecting it”.

A top priority for world-leading firms – Mayer Brown

Andrew J. Stanger, a Professional Support Lawyer at Mayer Brown, also made clear that adopting technology was a top priority for the law firm, seeing it as integral to enhancing the lawyer-client relationship. He elaborated: “We aspire to offer a world-class service to our clients and that requires a serious involvement with technology - it helps save time and costs and most importantly, helps our lawyers work better and more efficiently.”

He sounded a note of caution though, adding, “Not all vendors and products are created equally.” In fact, the firm went through a “rigorous” testing process before selecting Luminance’s AI technology: “Luminance checked all the boxes and has some pretty outstanding features that have worked really well for Mayer Brown”, highlighting Luminance’s ‘easy-to-use’ interface and advanced collaboration capabilities.

Why AI is a critical enabler for the Big Four – EY Law USA

It’s not just law firms seeing the potential of AI technology. Heidi Stenberg, Principal at EY Law USA, explained to the panel how the ‘Big Four’ legal services provider recently used Luminance’s pioneering technology for a high-volume M&A transaction: “We had a global pharmaceutical client who was facing an upcoming merger and the timeline was rapidly (approaching).” With over 190,000 contracts to review, the team opted to see how AI could assist them. Heidi went on to say that by “Using Luminance we reviewed the entire dataset in 10 days” and explained that without AI technology, completing this transaction within the tight timeline would not have been feasible: in fact, “Luminance opened our client’s eyes to the art of possible.”

Luminance’s award-winning platform has been at the forefront of the adoption of AI in the legal profession and has been deployed by offices of all of the ‘Big Four’ for nearly two years.

To see a full recording of the LegalWeek panel hosted by Luminance’s General Manager, Eleanor Weaver, click here.

About the LegalWeek panel event, ‘How AI is transforming legal practice’

Host:

Eleanor Weaver, General Manager, Luminance

Guests:

Tanja Podinic, Assistant General Counsel, Dentons

Andrew J. Stanger, Professional Support Lawyer, Mayer Brown

Heidi Stenberg, Principal, EY Law USA

To see a full recording, click here.

About Luminance

Luminance is the leading artificial intelligence platform for lawyers, used by over 300 law firms and organisations in over 50 countries. Luminance uniquely combines supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of legal documents, allowing firms such as Bird & Bird, Slaughter & May and White & Case to perform rapid and effective document reviews across practice areas such as M&A due diligence, regulatory compliance, property portfolio analysis and eDiscovery. www.luminance.com