If you have any experience with AMD as a company, you’ll know that we are heavily invested in artificial intelligence.

The desire of our CEO, Doctor Lisa Su, is that as an AI company, we look for opportunities to actually bring AI into the company.

As one of the lawyers in the legal department who was tasked with looking for opportunities for AI in our department as a commercial lawyer, I said wouldn’t it be great if we could find a tool that could actually mark up contracts, review contracts, analyse contracts, summarise contracts, and classify contracts.

We started looking at various tools and reading Gartner reports. We looked at probably three or four, maybe five Auto Mark-Up-type tools, and Luminance was far, by far, above the competition. We felt that this was a partner we could work with.

Current Operations

Probably 85% of the agreements done at AMD go through my team. It’s a lot of content and a lot of work. I have a small but mighty team, smaller than you would think, handling 2,500 NDAs and probably 3 or 400 commercial agreements a year. We needed something that would help us do that work faster, review those contracts, highlight risk areas, and ultimately, the Holy Grail, actually bring in an agreement and mark it up in a way similar to how an experienced lawyer might.

The other thing is the sheer volume. We do probably 2,400 NDAs per year, and the goal is that any third-party NDA that comes in just goes through Luminance. Let Luminance do the first mark-up to take on some of the commodity-based work, let the AI identify the issues that we know are always there, and then let the lawyer or paralegal do the high-value negotiation.

Future Plans

There is a joke in my organization that Luminance is magic, and every time we’re faced with an opportunity or a challenge, the question becomes: why can’t Luminance do that?

We have 25,000 engineers who go out and license software, and they send their $1,500 software licenses to the legal department to review. We don’t have time for that. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just run those licenses through Luminance and say green light, you can proceed?

Any identified risks would have to go to the legal department; a yellow light might mean it doesn’t have to go to legal but has to go to a VP for approval. Luminance can do as good a job as a paralegal at identifying the risks.

The other day someone came to me and asked if I had a feedback clause that did a certain thing. I said yes, I do, but where is it? When did I write it? I think I did it three or four years ago — before or after COVID? And then I’d spend half an hour looking for it. Now I just say, hey Lumi, pull up all my feedback clauses that I’ve written in the last five years.

Given the opportunity, whenever something comes to mind that I’m doing manually, I ask myself: why am I doing that? Why can’t Luminance do it?