Clifford Chance launches LUCY, the first legal tech tool it has developed in-house. The software application LUCY automates parts of corporate-law transactions, supplementing the document analysis tools already available on the market. While these standard tools help to find text, information and clauses, to extract them and present them in Excel sheets, for instance, LUCY goes a step further, processing the data and integrating it in reports and transaction documents. Once digitalised, the data is available in subsequent transaction phases and thus ensures fast results. The legal teams at Clifford Chance can integrate LUCY in various cross-practice processes.
LUCY enables them to produce a structured document such as a fact sheet, a shareholder resolution or contract at the click of a button. It therefore automates fairly complex processing of existing data. LUCY has a modular structure and the modules can easily be combined in different ways depending on the project, for example to transfer data into automated templates. This means further documents such as corporate resolutions or commercial register filings can be produced, or additional tools such as machine translation applications can be integrated.
LUCY therefore saves on staff resources, which benefits both clients and the Clifford Chance legal teams themselves. Another advantage is that LUCY enables Clifford Chance to provide its clients with an initial analysis of the key aspects of a prospective transaction fast. Ongoing evaluations are performed for quality assurance purposes.
The legal tech tool was developed by a multi-disciplinary team led by partner and Head of Innovation Germany Sandra Thiel and of counsel Professor Thomas Gasteyer in the German "Innovation & Best Delivery Hub", the firm's integrated digitalisation and legal tech centre in Germany.
Sandra Thiel: "We are delighted to have developed our first legal tech tool tailored to the requirements of our clients and our legal practice. Being able to automatically process digitalised information with LUCY and use this so efficiently means we can give our clients an overview of key legal aspects of transactions much more quickly. The extensive expertise and experience of our lawyers and the know-how of our Innovation & Best Delivery teams were invaluable in developing this tool. LUCY offers our clients and our legal teams added value in many respects, as demonstrated by the number of transactions where we have already successfully used the tool."