Technological innovation is a key driver of success for today’s legal sector. As Dr Mike Lynch OBE said at a recent Luminance webinar, “the power and flexibility of machine learning is the future of legal technology.” Indeed, it is essential that lawyers are using cutting-edge technologies to increase productivity, boost efficiency and collaborate more effectively across multiple office branches. That is why industry-leading firms such as Ernst & Young (EY), Bird & Bird, Dentons and Eversheds Sutherland are paving the way for innovation with a global rollout of Luminance, allowing for an even easier deployment of the Luminance platform across the firms’ international offices.

Enhance efficiencies across different territories with a global rollout

If firms have multiples offices worldwide, the Luminance team can co-ordinate a rollout strategy across multiple locations and multiple offices. This allows each new member firm to benefit from globally agreed terms ensuring a smooth onboarding process.

The unique flexibility and scalability of Luminance’s machine learning means that it can be used to enhance a number of practice areas across a firm’s different departments and offices. Luminance has two different AI-powered products for legal professionals. With Luminance Diligence, lawyers can achieve vast time-savings in contract reviews, including M&A due diligence, insurance underwriting, repapering, as well as COVID-19-related reviews including the identification of force majeure. Recently, an EY office saw a 90% time saving on a due diligence exercise using Luminance Diligence, slashing review time from five months to 10 days using Luminance. Alternatively, Luminance Discovery can be used to support lawyers in eDiscovery and investigations, including litigation, arbitration disputes and DSARs (Data Subject Access Requests). Only recently, top-tier Scottish law firm, Burness Paull, used Luminance Discovery to cull 90% of irrelevant data in a matter of minutes.

Firms are increasingly extending their usage of Luminance across territories. Various Ernst & Young (EY) offices in Europe, Australia and Southern and Central America are using Luminance to conduct due diligence and contract review at unmatched speeds and with unparalleled insight, with Portugal one of the most recent geographies to adopt Luminance. Similarly, a large number of Dentons’ European, Middle Eastern and African offices, including the Kenyan and South African branches, are signing up to use Luminance to expedite legal review processes.

Seamless collaboration across offices

By rolling out Luminance across offices globally, lawyers can gain the benefits of Luminance’s in-built project management and collaboration tools. This is particularly useful for lawyers working on a project across different time zones and locations, with features such as automatic document and task allocation ensuring the right jobs are fed to the correct employees and there is no duplication of work effort, whilst granular work progression and tracking tools across projects and individuals ensures a seamless, coordinated review.

For instance, the Dubai office of Dentons recently used Luminance’s eDiscovery platform to help assist with a time-sensitive arbitration case. Dentons, who have had a global agreement with Luminance since 2018, were able to work seamlessly across the firm’s London, Watford and Dubai offices, allowing them to review 180,000 documents in just 12 working days using Luminance, generating time savings of 80% for their client.

Luminance is a language and jurisdiction-agnostic technology, currently working in over 80 languages, and as such is able to immediately ingest and analyse documents irrespective of language, jurisdiction or form. This ensures a seamless review process for working across multiple geographies. For example, Ernst & Young’s (EY) German team used Luminance to work fluidly across English, German, Finnish, Dutch and French documents for a recent due diligence review.

Accelerated insights shared between offices

By blending both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, Luminance ensures that the lawyer is at the heart of the review process. With every document uploaded to Luminance, the technology reads, understands and learns from the interactions between lawyers and their contracts, becoming continually advanced and more bespoke as it is used.

This is particularly useful for firms that have a global deal with Luminance, who can share the ‘learning’ in their Luminance environment to other offices, allowing lawyers to build off the success of the offices that adopted earlier. Not only does this accelerate the review, but it enables lawyers to deliver results with more insight and precision than ever before.

Tailor-made adoption for your firm

Whilst Luminance can be used ‘out-of-the-box’, the Luminance team remains on hand to support clients at every stage of the adoption process. Starting with a complimentary two-week pilot period for all prospective customers where lawyers get to try out the technology on their own documents, Luminance then continues to offer clients a 24/7 support service, as well as dedicated Product Specialists who can provide user training and firmwide orientation sessions. With cloud-based deployment and an intuitive user-interface, Luminance enables firms to see real value on day one of their review. Most recently, boutique Spanish firm, JAP, saw a 70% time saving during a pilot phase of Luminance, despite having no prior experience with the technology.

All customers are then assigned a dedicated Account Manager to provide support and guidance on best practices and suggestions that align with the culture and workflow of a firm. As well as designing a specific onboarding plan tailored to a firm, Account Managers are there to assist firms with ongoing internal training sessions, innovation days, events, marketing materials and much more.

Leading AI technology for lawyers

Luminance was launched in 2016, the platform and is now being used by lawyers from over 230 law firms and organisations worldwide. Luminance is currently used in over 80 languages, with over 40% of customers working primarily with documents written in a language other than English.