In-house legal teams including Vodafone, Featurespace and Ferrero are using London-based legaltech firm Luminance’s new artificial intelligence platform to help their departments get a better grip on their contracting issues.

The platform – Luminance Corporate – streamlines the contract lifecycle process by automating contract drafting, version control and renewal, enabling in-house lawyers to better understand, manage and negotiate their contracts. The platform’s AI capabilities also provide insights on those contracts, meaning lawyers don’t have to manually search for key information.

Rosemary Martin, group general counsel and company secretary at Vodafone, said: “Good technology can make a really positive difference in corporate legal departments. Being able to rapidly analyse contracts and display critical information means lawyers no longer have to waste time trawling through their contracts.”

Martin said such tools enable lawyers to quickly and easily see which areas of a contract need to be negotiated, which can speed up the time to contract.

“Faster contracting means faster revenue generation,” she said.

Luminance says its complete suite of AI-powered legaltech tools is used by more than 300 organisations across 55 countries.

Don Riddick, chief legal officer at Featurespace, said: “Contract analysis is a fundamental process with business critical implications, however it has historically been time- and resource-intensive,” adding that since using Luminance’s AI tools it has been able to expedite the review of legal documents.

A report published earlier this year by EY Law and Harvard Business School found that fewer than a third of in-house counsel globally believe they have the technology they need to do their jobs effectively, with 97% saying they are struggling to secure investment for legaltech from their organisations’ management teams.

Almost nine in every 10 lawyers said they are wasting too much time on low-value, routine tasks.

The amount of legaltech available, however, continues to proliferate. Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe last year launched a legaltech comparison tool that tracks more than 600 legaltech products.

Investors are also eyeing the potential in legaltech. In April, Canadian cloud-based legaltech provider Clio became the world’s first legal practice management unicorn, after its $110m Series E funding round sent its value soaring to $1.6bn. To date, global legaltech businesses have secured $6.6bn in funding, Clio said.