The brief
Lander & Rogers was instructed by a client who operates across 15 different retail businesses in Australia and New Zealand to undertake a contract consolidation project. Over time, the client had accrued almost 70 employment contract templates. With a diverse range of contracts, some with different terms for negotiation, the client wanted to consolidate all documents and reduce the number of templates to just six, to ensure that each employee was afforded the same rights and protections, and to simplify the process of issuing employment contracts that were drafted on the same terms. We assigned two lawyers to conduct a rigorous analysis of every clause across the full document set, to create a standardised contract template.
The challenge
Manually comparing the details of every clause across so many employment contracts would be time-consuming and laborious; our lawyers would need to read through each document, identify important clauses and then copy these key clauses into Excel for manual comparison and analysis. They would then be limited to working in spreadsheets, rather than within the context of the actual documents. We needed a more efficient way of handling the contract consolidation.
The solution
We implemented AI technology from Luminance – which we had previously used for due diligence reviews – to assist our lawyers in the project. Through a combination of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning, the contract AI platform was able to:
- immediately read and form an understanding of the contracts, instantly surfacing critical information such as confidentiality, payment and holiday entitlement clauses, governing law and currencies;
- easily identify all examples and variations of a given clause to ensure nothing was missed in the review;
- discover and label clauses, then identify similarities and differences in wording across documents and clauses to demonstrate deviations and compliance at-a-glance;
- export and compile this data into a custom report;
- mark 'model' clauses to be used as exemplars for drafting future contracts, to avoid double-handling and provide structure and insight to ongoing work.
Luminance’s AI technology allowed our lawyers to completely transform the contract consolidation process, including the way they conducted their review, and be confident that nothing had been missed. The platform reduced review time by 30 hours, with the cost savings in billable time passed on to the client.
Our legal teams are now looking at ways to use the Luminance platform to support other contractual needs across our practice areas, including real estate and banking.
“The number of contracts that a business today is executing is ever-increasing. AI is providing a real solution to the problem of contract consolidation, allowing lawyers to quickly understand the intricacies of their contracts but in a way that is easy to digest, efficient and extremely insightful. A platform like Luminance is revolutionary for legal teams needing to harmonise and align their contracts at rapid speeds.”
Joel Kennedy, Head of Client Projects.
Learn more about legal innovation services at Lander & Rogers.
