04 August | Driving time and cost efficiencies into legal service delivery remains a key factor behind the surge in AI adoption, say top legal professionals and innovation experts at TechLaw.Fest.

Speaking at this year’s flagship conference in Singapore during a fireside discussion hosted by Luminance, the leading provider for AI-powered legal process automation, was Caryn Sandler, Partner and Chief Innovation Officer at Gilbert + Tobin. The conversation focused upon the increased adoption of AI across the legal sector, as law firms and businesses alike seek to understand their contractual obligations and drive profitability against a backdrop of enhanced regulation and growing efficiency demands.

Providing the law firm perspective, Caryn described how AI can help generate significant time efficiencies during large-scale contract reviews: “We have large document sets and it’s really useful to get an understanding of some of their key datapoints, whether it be the different geographies or knowing whether we have to engage foreign counsel or getting a spread of how similar the documents are and what clauses exist. We can get really good insight...Getting those initial insights into a large volume of documents in a very, very short period of time is incredibly useful.”

Caryn went on to explain why AI has become so essential to private practice lawyers, citing the growing expectation among clients that advanced technology will be deployed to optimise legal services and deliver invaluable time-savings: “If I think about where we’re going, we’re starting to see a real desire from clients for law firms, particularly, to utilise technology and drive efficiency. I think that is expected now and that will only become more expected over the next few years.”

On a panel chaired by Eric Chin, Director at PwC NewLaw & Founding Board at ASEAN LegalTech, innovation experts and technology providers from across the APAC region discussed why AI adoption is front and centre of their customers’ business strategies.

Rory McDaid, Senior Account Executive at Luminance, pointed to the growing demand for AI-powered legal process automation among in-house legal teams, as businesses seek to eliminate the efficiencies too commonly associated with workflow allocation and the inability to locate essential legal information: “Organisations require self-service solutions which allow other stakeholders within the business to engage with legal. Efficiency shouldn’t be restricted to legal in terms of their function – it should extend to the way they engage with external stakeholders, whether they are private practice or in-house legal teams, because that’s where true efficiency lies.”

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 trusted by over 450 customers in 60 countries, including all of the Big Four consultancy firms, a quarter of the world’s largest law firms and multinational organisations.