TRANSFORMING PASSENGER LAWSUIT HANDLING WITH CASE AUTOMATION 

As Germany’s leading network carrier, Lufthansa operates from its major hubs in Frankfurt and Munich and serves as a cornerstone of European air mobility, connecting German business and leisure travelers with destinations across the entire globe. With a flight volume of some 472,000 departures in 2024 and over 64 million passengers carried by its core airline business, Lufthansa demonstrates both scale and operational complexity.

Lufthansa’s German operations underpin one of Europe’s most intricate regulatory environments, spanning from EU passenger-rights claims to complex international routing, making it a compelling case for pioneering legal and claims-automation initiatives.

In this light, Lufthansa’s decision to digitize and streamline its passenger-lawsuits case-management processes is not simply a process upgrade, but a strategic move to strengthen operational integrity and customer trust in one of Europe’s most demanding aviation markets.

The Challenge

Stable air traffic is subject to numerous external influences, such as weather conditions, strikes, demonstrations, and several other logistical factors. The EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation provides passengers with comprehensive rights in case of delays or cancellations.

Considering the number of daily flights and the fact that each flight typically affects hundreds of passengers, major airlines need to cope with a high intake of passenger lawsuits that need to be verified and processed.

Lufthansa’s legal department, like all legal units of large airline carriers, was facing a growing challenge in managing passenger lawsuits, particularly those arising from flight delays, cancellations, and operational disruptions. Under EU passenger rights regulations, each incident can trigger compensation claims that must be resolved quickly and accurately. However, gathering the necessary information to quickly respond to these claims involved lots of moving parts and became a tall order.

Relevant data, such as operational date, weather data, and passenger communications, was spread across multiple internal and external systems. Accessing this data often required manual work, involving several departments, and could potentially cause delays. As a result, responding to lawsuits was time-consuming and fragmented, while cases sometimes ended in unnecessary settlements simply because the full data picture wasn’t available in time.

Manual process not only slowed down case handling but also made it difficult to ensure data accuracy and completeness. The setup also limited collaboration between the airline’s internal legal teams and external law firms, as each party relied on separate tools, emails, and spreadsheets.

Scope

The sheer volume of passenger lawsuits presents challenges for legal departments and their law firms, resulting in a veritable flood of data. Countless documents, whether printed or digital, must be reviewed and processed as part of the correspondence between the parties.

For efficient case processing, this data must be researched and compiled. Manual processing and evaluation of this information is very time-consuming and resource-intensive, prolonging the proceedings.

The goal for Lufthansa was to significantly increase the efficiency of litigation processes, as a fast resolution of proceedings is both in the interest of customers and the carrier. To achieve a higher level of efficiency, the airline started looking into solutions to digitize and partially automate the claim handling process while also providing a secure environment for cooperation.

Besides, Airline legal departments generally do not operate independently but often cooperate with other internal units as well as with external parties such as law firms. This prompted the search for a platform that could also be accessed by other internal and external law firms. However, to comply with data protection regulations and guarantee full transparency, the solution would have had to guarantee specific individual access rights to different parties and a secure environment for data exchange.

Tested Solutions that Fell Short

Under the initiative Project Paladin (Passenger Lawsuit Digitalization) initiated by the internal legal department, before adopting JUNE, Lufthansa Industry Solutions and the airline’s legal operations team evaluated other potential approaches: both internal tools and external vendor solutions, as part of the Paladin project’s early discovery phase.

However, after this investigation, they concluded that none of the available options could meet Lufthansa’s specific needs.
The main reasons other solutions failed were:

Lack of Legal Specialization: Many case management tools were generic workflow systems or ticketing tools not designed for legal workflows, meaning they couldn’t understand legal document structures or court processes.

Poor Data Integration Capabilities: Lufthansa’s environment involves complex and distributed data. Most existing tools couldn’t integrate these data sources, especially not securely through Lufthansa’s enterprise IT architecture, which requires the highest level of security.

Limited Automation and AI: Other tools could digitize documents, but they couldn’t automatically understand, classify, or extract data from them. Lufthansa wanted a solution that could go beyond digitization to support data-driven decision-making.

Security & Compliance Constraints: External SaaS solutions weren’t allowed to connect directly to Lufthansa’s internal systems due to strict IT security policies. The solution needed to rely on a controlled, single endpoint rather than multiple uncontrolled integrations, which eliminated many off-the-shelf tools.

The Solution

Eventually, it became clear that it was necessary to rethink the processes and the systems involved. That rethinking led directly to the creation of a Data Hub combined with the JUNE architecture, where Paladin became the secure data hub and JUNE the intelligent legal workflow layer on top.

Recognizing the inefficiency of manual case handling, Lufthansa set out to redesign its legal operations around digitization and data.
Within the scope of Project Paladin, Lufthansa Industry Solutions was requested to build a dedicated data hub, a central system capable of automatically retrieving relevant information from the airline’s operational databases.

And to manage the workflow and speed up document processing, Lufthansa selected JUNE, an AI-powered case management platform specifically designed for legal teams.

Why JUNE

JUNE enabled Lufthansa to move beyond simply digitizing old processes. Instead, it supported a complete operational transformation toward data-driven case management.

JUNE stood out because of its ability to:

• Recognize and classify legal documents automatically
• Extract key data such as flight numbers, booking codes, and claim amounts
• Integrate seamlessly with Lufthansa’s internal systems via secure APIs
• Support collaboration between Lufthansa’s legal team and external counsel within a single secure platform

The goal of the optimization project was not just efficiency for its own sake, but a strategic shift that allowed lawyers to focus on legal analysis rather than administrative work.

JUNE offered:

• Intelligent document understanding through AI categorization
• Workflow automation triggered by recognized data points
• A unified view of each case, integrating all relevant operational and legal data
• Secure collaboration spaces where internal and external teams can work together without compromising confidentiality

All these components appeared to be key elements that would allow them to combine improved data centralization with smart operations to maximize efficiency.

Outcome

The introduction of JUNE, integrated with the Paladin Data Hub, revolutionized Lufthansa’s approach to passenger lawsuits.
Currently, Lufthansa uses JUNE primarily on incoming and outgoing mail, as well as automatically triggered workflows. For each claim, the AI pulls all essential data into the digital file and adds the relevant Lufthansa flight information. Once defined, specific workflows are then partially automatically triggered, and the responsible users are prompted to complete the corresponding tasks.

At the same time, as a collaboration platform, JUNE avoids discrepancies and redundant workflows that may result from working on separate systems with external partner law firms.

Key results:

Response time reduction: What once took days or weeks to assemble manually can now be retrieved within typically around 20 minutes per case.

Higher accuracy: The complete data picture (operational data, weather, communications) ensures decisions are based on full evidence, minimizing potential minor discrepancies.

Improved transparency: Passengers now receive faster and clearer responses, strengthening trust and loyalty.

Increased productivity & legal defense insourcing: Legal experts can focus on strategic work rather than repetitive data collection. JUNE transforms manual workflows into structured, data-driven, and automated processes, thereby reducing the resource requirements for core tasks.

More efficient internal and external communication: Collab Spaces allow Lufthansa to have a full overview of all documents and processes, while partners are only granted access to the information and documents required to provide support.

Eventually, Lufthansa managed to shift from a process that was fragmented, manual, and time-consuming to one that is integrated, efficient, and powered by data.