On the 23rd April, Luminance won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation. We interviewed CTO James Loxam and CEO Emily Foges to discuss the win and upcoming event at the palace.

Q: Congratulations on receiving a Queen’s Award: Business Weekly described the competition this year as ‘red-hot’. What do you think made Luminance stand out?

EF: Put very simply, our technology is unique and is genuinely changing the legal profession.

JL: At its core, Luminance’s unmatched combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning makes the platform so powerful and intelligent. No other technology that truly understands legal language like Luminance. This is what has made us stand out in the industry, and has contributed to our winning the Queen’s Award.

Q: Is the award important to you as a British business?

EF: It is an honour to be pioneering British technology across the globe and we take pride in our foundations at the University of Cambridge. The Queen’s Award reinforces our position as a British company at the forefront of artificial intelligence research.

Q: The Queen has commented that the awards are an opportunity for companies “to project themselves on the world stage”. Do you view the awards as a launchpad for further growth and new projects?

EF: Of course, the added media attention and exposure that the awards bring can only help our growth as a company, and our reputation in our industry more widely.

JL: There is always a temptation to rest on your laurels when you receive this kind of accolade, but, for us, innovation is continuous and ongoing. Our R+D teams are constantly working to provide our customers with the most advanced technology at their fingertips, and improve both the functionality and stability of our products. We are a machine-learning company first and foremost, and because our work is always research led, there is no limit to the benefits we can bring to the legal sphere.

Q: Are you surprised to be receiving this award when the company is still less than three years old?

JL: Yes, the company is young, but our success in such a short space of time is remarkable. The legal technology market today is expanding fast, and to be market leaders in under 3 years is even more impressive. We are hugely proud to be the market-leader, and we are excited to show off what we can do next!

Q: What do awards like this mean for legal technology?

EF: It has been well publicised that the legal technology industry has lagged behind its older siblings such as FinTech and InsurTech in terms of adoption and implementation of new solutions. An award as significant as this is really important to us, as it recognises the strides that we are making in our field, both in terms of innovation and driving adoption, as well as the progress that the industry is seeing as a whole.

Q: The Queen’s Award for Enterprise is valid for 5 years. What do the next 5 years look like for Luminance?

EF: We don’t intend to slow down any time soon! When you consider the possible applications of artificial intelligence, we have only just scratched the surface, so we’re intrigued to see what our research will uncover in the next 5 years. Building on our successes to date, Luminance will become the norm for all lawyers wanting to maintain a competitive edge in the modern legal profession, and as the only provider of true AI, we are excited to be at the forefront of this transformation.