"Does this count as an'act of God'?" That's the question legal teams everywhere were asking when Covid hit the US last March. Clients wanted to search out force majeure clauses in thousands of real estate agreements and other contracts, wondering if a pandemic could render them null and void. Not only were there more docs to review than usual, but also lawyers had to find quick answers to critical, unprecedented issues...all while working from home. The 100-person team at Luminance, a UK-based AI-for-legal startup, felt like they were at the center of it all. Founded by University of Cambridge mathematicians in 2015, the company specializes in automated legal doc review and analysis.

With in-house teams around the world grappling with growing numbers of contracts stored across multiple repositories and increased pressure to comply with complex regulation, Luminance's new Corporate product will allow in-house counsel to save time and resource, streamline legal processes and gain greater insight into their contractual landscape. Instead of manually sifting through contracts in order to identify and collate key information, Luminance's AI-powered technology will give in-house teams immediate insight into their contracts, highlighting key features such as clauses, parties and Governing Law. Crucially, for the first time ever, in-house lawyers will be able to tap into Luminance's powerful machine learning for contract analysis from within Microsoft Word, all during the regular workflow of their review. For contracts under negotiation, Luminance has the ability to proactively search documents to see what changes have been made by counterparties, including those changes which may have been conducted without track changes being switched on in Word. When negotiating on a specific clause, Luminance will show lawyers precedent at the click of a button, highlighting areas where conceptually similar clauses have been previously signed off by their organisation.

It's clear these newer entrants to the legal tech space are not afraid of embracing AI in order to drive efficiency and growth, particularly when that means that they can cut costs by bringing legal work in house.

Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Parker's first day at work at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright in Australia involved 1,000 conversations with potential clients. Even the most super-energetic young lawyer would normally manage only a fraction of that but Parker is, of course, a chatbot -- a computer program that simulates human conversation. The new recruit is a prime example of how law firms in Asia-Pacific are experimenting with artificial intelligence to improve efficiency. Chatbots, which use AI to answer simple questions from people wanting to learn more about a subject, are already being adopted in industries ranging from banking to medicine.

It was always going to be a momentous week for legal technology with the world's largest Global Legal Hackathon taking place in over 40 cities. But for the Aussies, it was a double whammy with ALTA's inaugural event and the launch of its Demo Day series, showcasing some of Australia's best legal technology start-ups all on one stage, in very lawyer-like six minute-long demonstrations. Hosted by Macquarie Bank at their Melbourne and Sydney headquarters and also supported by industry heavyweights Janders Dean and Elevate Services, the dual city tour was attended by a diverse variety of industry stakeholders including in-house legal departments, government, law societies, academics, multi-nationals and'techies', whilst Big Law right through to NewLaw and even'tiny' law were all well represented. What emerged from the two days was the incredible depth of our home-grown talent with many commenting on the impressive diversity; the companies showing off everything from data-driven tools for in-house teams to even an AI powered'law firm without lawyers'; but most importantly, a true sense of community was born. The ideas, conversations and relationships that transpired during the coffee breaks, in the conference rooms, and that continued out the doors well after the final demo will have a lasting effect.

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Canadian legal consultant and futurist Jordan Furlong of Law Twenty One and asked him about his perspective on what opportunities and challenges AI faced in the legal sector. Do you see a strategic advantage for the law firms that embrace AI? If yes, how would that advantage manifest itself? We should probably begin by creating a working definition of'AI', which is a term applied so broadly in the legal sphere that, as Ryan McClead has pointed out, it might as well just be written as'magic'. Michael Mills of Neota Logic has suggested instead the term'cognitive technologies', which encompasses a wide range of tech applications including machine learning, natural language processing, and expert systems.