12 April 2022 | The increasing volume and complexity of regulation has been a key factor behind the surge in AI adoption, say top legal professionals and innovation experts from Mayer Brown, IDEXX Laboratories and Liberty Mutual during a talk at Legalweek earlier this month.

Speaking at this year’s flagship Legalweek New York conference during a panel hosted by Luminance, the leading provider for AI-powered legal process automation, were Jordan Galvin, Global Legal Innovation Supervisor at Global Top 100 law firm, Mayer Brown, Jackie O’Neill, Director of Project Management at multinational insurer, Liberty Mutual, and Matt Forsyth, Deputy General Counsel at global pharmaceutical company, IDEXX Laboratories.

The industry experts discussed why, against a backdrop of enhanced regulation and severe penalties for organisations found to be non-compliant, the need for AI across the private practice and in-house legal community has never been greater. The panellists went on to describe how the challenge of remaining compliant amid an ever-changing regulatory environment has been further complicated by the unprecedented volume of legal content that needs to be reviewed and understood in order to maintain regulatory compliance.

Indeed, Matt Forsyth explained how AI has been of critical importance to his company, IDEXX Laboratories, when conducting large-scale contract reviews across its entire supply chain in light of sudden recent changes to sanctioned countries. He said, “Recently, we had to grind through our entire contract database to understand where our contractual ties lay and, specifically, where we had agreements with recently sanctioned countries and countries currently in turmoil. With Luminance, we were able to analyse a huge number of contracts and identify the relevant documents in only twenty minutes, which was essential given the scale and sensitivity of the issue.”

Matt Forsyth noted that the insight provided by AI is unmatched by traditional review techniques, which now place legal professionals at significant risk of missing key information buried within enormous datasets, “This type of review is something that would have taken us weeks to complete using a traditional CLM or manual review methods. We would have also had a low degree of confidence that every piece of essential information had been captured, since these approaches can be quite unreliable. With Luminance’s AI, I have a very high degree of confidence that we identified absolutely everything of relevance among our contracts.”

Jackie O’Neill from insurer Liberty Mutual went on to note how AI’s ability to read and understand vast quantities of legal content in a matter of seconds, processing and flagging key information, gives lawyers increased confidence in the accuracy of their decision-making, stating, “I think a lot of time we’re actually empowering people and building their confidence that they are doing the work and they are doing it right the first time. When you’re building confidence in these tools and they know they’ve done [their review] right the first time, it really empowers them.”

ENDS

About Luminance

Luminance is the world’s most advanced AI technology for the legal processing of contracts and documents. Founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Luminance’s AI reads and forms a conceptual understanding of documents in any language. Luminance uses this understanding to augment the spectrum of legal matters, from AI-powered contract drafting, negotiation and review to investigations and eDiscovery. Luminance is used by over 400 customers in 60 countries, including all of the Big Four consultancy firms, a quarter of the world’s largest law firms and multinational organisations.