"Luminance was also a standout in terms of the customer relations experience."

Imerys was trying to solve several challenges when it started looking at AI technologies. Primarily the first challenge was that we knew our contract management solution that we’d had for about 15 years was no longer really a viable product.

It caused us to go to market, look at what was available, and as we were looking at the many options out there, it became apparent that we would not be doing the company any good if we didn’t choose a contract management solution that was not AI powered.

Imerys chose Luminance among about a dozen suppliers that it began an RFP process with about a year before we chose a final solution. Luminance had a lot of features that really stood out among that crowd.

First, it was a truly comprehensive solution. Luminance was also really a standout in terms of the customer relations experience working with both the sales folks as well as the folks who set up our sandbox. It was clear that those folks really cared about their customers and wanted to show off the system that they were legitimately proud of.

We actually put them through the paces with some of our own documents and some of our own templates, something that other vendors were not really willing to do because it would have taken time out of their day. And Luminance was very collaborative, letting us see the system as we would see it.

“The repository is such a powerful engine”

Some of our use cases are really standard ones just evaluating our contracts and knowing what they say. We have never really gone to school on our own contracts in the past. We knew what each individual contract did, but we’ve not looked at them as an ecosystem and really tried to understand them so that we could possibly modify our contracting process.

The repository is such a powerful engine that we’ve already run some searches and gotten some real surprises about the way we’ve negotiated contracts in the past, and it may cause us to think twice about some of our template terms.

We’re interested in making sure that we’re all starting from the same place when we draft a contract in the first place. And also that when we’re engaging with a third-party contract, that we have standard terms that we know we’ve vetted and we agree that those are the things we want to, if we can possibly get that term to negotiate. We haven’t really had that level of consistency.

It’s going to really give us an opportunity to see whether or not we do have more leverage in our contract negotiation process than we thought.

“We wanted to take a pretty basic task off the hands of our lawyers so they can focus on some more high value projects”

One of the main complaints we’ve gotten over the years is that we’re a little slow getting those NDAs out. And quite honestly, they’re not agreements that we ever really have that much controversy around.

So, we wanted to empower our business clients to do that and really take a pretty basic task off the hands of our lawyers so they can focus on some more high value projects.

AI is important for legal teams to use for a variety of reasons, but primarily for us the benefit is to take things off our plate that we don’t need to be working on as lawyers.
Whether that is low value contracts that can easily be evaluated and negotiated, NDAs that can quickly be done by business users instead of Imerys lawyers or evaluations historically of contracts so we can see trends happening and react to them rather than dealing with them as one offs and possibly coming to some unfortunate results.

AI is super powerful for us to understand our own business, our own contracts, and also to be able to just do more legal work outside of the CLM itself.