04 April 2023 | In-house legal teams have been feeling the pressure to do more with less in the current economic climate according to top lawyers and innovation experts from Koch Industries, Hitachi Vantara, and Yokogawa Corporation of America. This has spurred the roll-out of AI technology at these top corporations in order to streamline processes and improve business-wide efficiencies.

Speaking at this year’s flagship Legalweek conference during a panel hosted by Luminance, the global leader for legal process automation, were Laura Pickle, CIO and Discovery Director at multinational conglomerate, Koch Industries, George Niño, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for global engineering and software provider, Yokogawa Corporation of America, and Jeannine Moran, Director of Legal and Compliance Operations at IT service management company, Hitachi Vantara.

The industry experts revealed how implementing AI across their different business units has helped to increase self-sufficiency of non-legal departments when it comes to contracting processes, in turn reducing the amount of work passing Legal’s desk and decreasing time to signature. Now, Sales, Procurement, HR and Finance teams can automatically generate their own compliant agreements and kickstart the negotiation process.

Speaking at the conference in New York, Jeannine Moran explained how AI is transforming Hitachi Vantara’s internal contract request protocols: “[Our early use case] was the self-service generation of low-risk contracts like NDAs. The goal was to not have Legal touch the contract from inception to signature, unless we needed to. The business loved it! Now they can generate their own agreements and send them straight out to signature, confident in the knowledge that they have gone through all the legal thresholds. With Luminance, we can now get a signed NDA from start to finish in five minutes.”

Moran noted that the company’s contract administrator, who was historically creating these types of documents manually, has now been freed up to do more value-add tasks. Furthermore, using a self-service contract generation tool has meant that fewer contracts are negotiated on third party paper, speeding up the negotiation process and improving Hitachi Vantara’s service delivery.

Laura Pickle from manufacturing conglomerate, Koch Industries, echoed Moran’s thoughts, stating that Luminance’s AI has proven to be a business-wide tool rather than confined to Legal. Not only does Luminance’s AI-powered Traffic Light Analysis, which highlights risk according to company and industry standards, provide non-lawyers across the business with fallback clauses, but it also tells them why a provision is acceptable or not, educating them each time they look at a routine agreement. She said: “A salesperson can look through the contract and learn every time.”

George Niño from global engineering and software provider, Yokogawa, echoed this sentiment: “With Luminance, we now have a more thoughtful approach to managing those contracts…This is the first time I've seen all different departments embracing a software.”

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ENDS

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