Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, has turned its product toward assisting lawyers with international regulatory compliance, including Brexit. Initially focused on tackling the time-consuming task of M&A due diligence, Luminance has developed its machine learning platform to enable lawyers to assess the impact of regulatory change and determine whether new contracts are compliant with internal practices.

GDPR review time-savings

According to the head of compliance at one major retail bank: 'the powerful technology can easily adapt to any field of law, which made all the difference when it came to our time-pressured GDPR review.' The bank achieved 85 per cent time-savings compared to manual methods alone on a compliance review for GDPR, cutting the allocated time spent from eight weeks to seven days. Luminance was founded in 2016 as a result of collaboration between mathematicians from Cambridge University and legal experts. The language-agnostic platform reads and understands legal documents in a similar way to humans, coping with volumes and working at speeds that no human can match. The technology instantly sorts and classifies documents while highlighting possible anomalies for lawyers’ review.

Focus for Lawyers

This week Luminance announced new M&A clients including international law firm Allens, Swedish law firm Gernandt & Danielsson, South African firm Webber Wentzel and Ellex in the Baltics. According to Rolandas Valiunas, managing partner of Ellex Valiunas, in the modern, global context of legal services, AI has become a standard, allowing lawyers to work faster and more effectively. 'As a leading law firm in the Baltic States, we are driven by the challenges of tomorrow's business while offering today’s solutions. Therefore, given that AI technology is already being used successfully in the day-to-day processes of some of the largest law firms in the world, we are working to keep pace with these global trends and invest in tools to allow our lawyers to streamline the contract review processes of complex legal matters, thus ensuring the highest quality services to our clients,' said Mr Valiunas. 

Five continents

Luminance now has over 75 customers in 23 countries across five continents. Mark Malinas, corporate partner and co-head of private equity at Allens said: 'The platform provides an instant insight into the entire data room, classifying documents, highlighting anomalies and focusing our lawyers’ attention on the areas that matter and the tasks that our clients value.'