Trench Group

As a high-voltage component manufacturer operating across sales, operations, and procurement functions, Trench Group faced a contract approval process that had become a significant operational bottleneck. Routine agreements consumed an average of 150 minutes of legal review time each, requiring direct involvement from qualified lawyers regardless of contract complexity or risk level. This created downstream delays in commercial decision-making and left the legal team with limited capacity for higher-value strategic counsel. With the volume of contracts spanning multiple business functions, the risk of missing critical obligations or overlooked exposures was compounded by the manual, time-intensive nature of the process.

Trench Group deployed Luminance's AI platform — developed by the Cambridge-based legal AI company — to automate the initial stage of contract review using Natural Language Processing. The system reads incoming contracts, identifies clauses that deviate from Trench Group's corporate standards, flags potential risk exposures, and surfaces suggested mitigations for the reviewing user. Rather than replacing legal oversight entirely, the platform introduced a triage model: non-legal teams in sales and operations can self-serve on standard agreements, with the legal department engaged only when the AI surfaces high-risk or complex issues. This created a centralised, auditable workflow that reduced manual intervention without sacrificing risk visibility, giving the legal team a single source of truth across the company's entire contract portfolio.

Contract review time dropped from 150 minutes to 30 minutes per contract — an 80% reduction — with approximately 80% of contracts now processed without initial legal team involvement. The impact on time-sensitive analysis was equally significant: a tariff impact assessment across 700 contracts, previously requiring two and a half weeks of manual work, was completed in under two hours using Luminance's platform. Qualitatively, the legal team shifted from document processing to strategic counsel, and management gained faster access to evidence-based commercial insights. Tim Siewert-La Chon, Head of Legal at Trench Group, noted the team now has "complete visibility into obligations and the confidence to make faster decisions."

• Triage by risk, not by default: routing only high-risk contracts to legal review — rather than all contracts — is what unlocks both speed and legal team capacity.
• NLP-based contract review delivers compounding value: the same system that handles routine approvals can be repurposed for time-sensitive portfolio-wide analysis, as the tariff assessment demonstrated.
• Non-legal adoption requires clear guardrails: enabling sales and operations teams to self-serve only works when the AI is configured against defined corporate standards and deviation thresholds.
• Broader industrial context matters: with over 70% of German manufacturers planning AI investment, legal operations automation is becoming a competitive baseline, not a differentiator.