12 September 2023 | Luminance, the pioneer in ‘legal-grade’ AI, today announced that British energy company, Ecotricity, has adopted its next-generation technology to augment and automate the work of its in-house legal department.

As one of the UK’s largest providers of green energy, Ecotricity negotiates and manages high volumes of contracts every day, ranging from Non-Disclosure and Supplier Agreements to Sponsorship and Construction Agreements. With so many contracts being negotiated, both by Legal and by other departments, Ecotricity sought a next-generation AI that could provide them with complete oversight of all contracts, ensuring compliance with internal standards as well as eliminating the time spent by Legal locating previously agreed language during negotiations.

Whilst previously the legal team would ‘manually’ review all contracts, spending time trawling through emails or a Sharepoint repository to find previously negotiated and acceptable language, Ecotricity will now benefit from Luminance’s revolutionary ability to take a first pass review of their contracts out-of-the-box, automatically highlighting which areas are compliant or non-standard according to their internal positions. With Luminance’s AI also able to update its knowledge of agreeable terms as organisational standards shift, Ecotricity is further assured that all institutional knowledge will be preserved, even in light of any personnel changes. This will help Ecotricity’s lean legal team to onboard new team members quickly and reduce the resource required to train junior counsel.

Another challenge that Ecotricity sought to overcome with Luminance’s AI was the time-consuming task of finding and reviewing of contracts across the business. Luminance provides instant insight into the status and workflow of contracts currently under negotiation, as well as a centralised AI-powered repository for all executed agreements, enabling them to drive internal efficiencies and proactively manage risk.

Looking ahead, Ecotricity plans to further reduce risk during the contracting process by empowering non-legal functions to use Luminance to draft their own compliant agreements. Luminance’s highly customisable contract generation functionality allows any employee to independently draft contracts, such as NDAs, using templates that have been pre-approved by Legal. As a result, Ecotricity will be able to minimise version control risk and ensure all contracts are negotiated on their preferred terms.

Rolf Stein, Group General Counsel at Ecotricity, commented: “Luminance’s AI is very sophisticated. It will be transformational for both our legal team and the wider business, allowing us to contract on our preferred terms and ensure compliance across the board.”

Lindsay Heaven, Senior Legal Counsel at Ecotricity, added: “Being able to run our contracts through Luminance is such a relief. It means we don’t have to spend hours reading through every single line to spot key information or risk. Luminance does the work instead so we can focus our attention elsewhere.”

Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, said: “More and more, we are seeing the value of AI in driving enterprise-wide efficiencies by automating traditionally labour-intensive legal tasks and improving the self-sufficiency of non-legal departments. With Luminance reducing the amount of work arriving on Legal’s desk, I look forward to seeing the time-savings and new business opportunities that our AI will unlock for Ecotricity.”

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 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.