The recent surge in antitrust legislation continues to make headlines as Big Tech rally against an onslaught of proposed reforms and organisations contend with further additions to an ever-growing list of compliance responsibilities. Designed to protect consumers and businesses from practices that prevent or reduce market competition, antitrust and competition laws now means organisations can incur gigantic financial penalties and reputational damage for non-compliance. In the UK, for instance, businesses found guilty of non-compliance can be punished with fines amounting to 10% of their global annual turnover.

With the stakes higher than ever for businesses operating in today’s corporate world, organisations have no alternative but to understand exactly what information is contained within their company’s documents. In our most recent webinar, we discussed how AI can help legal teams complete thorough and expedited reviews to ensure compliance for their organisations and clients.

Competition Law: The Challenges

When it comes to competition law, the scope of review is incredibly broad. Lawyers may be required to negotiate clearance for M&A deals, investigate how a client conducts business or even defend claims in the Competition Appeal Tribunal. These investigations demand a complete audit and evaluation of a company’s contracts to ensure that organisations are fully appraised of all details relating to their business operations.

However, in today’s data-driven world, where corporations must manage swelling volumes of documents, such large-scale reviews are no simple task. Indeed, in the age of digitalisation, traditional methods of manual review now carry significant risk of missing crucial information and placing a client in danger of non-compliance. With manual investigations also representing costly time and resource efficiencies in the time-pressured legal industry, many companies are turning to Luminance’s AI technology to facilitate the delivery of rapid, thorough document reviews and ensure that no stone is left unturned during the course of their investigation.

Achieving Critical Insight with Luminance Discovery

Luminance’s end-to-end eDiscovery platform supports lawyers across the entire spectrum of competition law reviews, using next-generation machine learning algorithms to read and form a conceptual understanding of an entire document set – no matter the size or language. Luminance’s AI automatically highlights key information such as party names, dates and Personally Identifiable information and presents this analysis back to the lawyer across a series of interactive 3D widgets. This intuitive display allows users to rapidly understand multiple areas of their investigation and drill down into specific areas of interest via simple point-and-click navigation.

Essential to any antitrust and competition law review is the ability to ‘cut through the noise’ of a large dataset and quickly get to the heart of the investigation. This is where Luminance’s powerful search, filter and data culling tools come in. Following document upload, one press of the ‘Hide Duplicates’ button can instantly reduce the dataset down to a more manageable size. In one instance of this data culling application, top Scottish law firm, Burness Paull, used ‘Hide Duplicates’ on a dataset consisting of 6,000 documents. With a simple click of a mouse, the dataset was reduced by 80% compared to its original size, allowing the team to streamline their investigation. Users can further accelerate their review with Luminance’s advanced searching tools and filtering widgets. By entering just a few key terms and applying a range of incredibly powerful filters, lawyers can zero-in on relevant information and exclude irrelevant documents in a matter of clicks.

Of course, the ability to achieve critical insight is of utmost importance to any lawyer conducting a high-volume (not to mention high stakes) investigation. Indeed, Discovery’s revolutionary ‘Find Similar’ tool reveals insight far more quickly and effectively than any filter. Once a document of interest has been identified, one click of ‘Find Similar’ leverages Luminance’s conceptual understanding of information to surface all other documents likely to also be relevant to an investigation. This is ground-breaking in the eDiscovery space and near impossible to perform manually. In a practical application, PSL Advocates & Solicitors leveraged Luminance’s ‘Find Similar’ upon finding one example of a respondent breaching an agreement in an email. Within a colossal set of 750,000 documents, Luminance surfaced all similarly worded examples of documents where the opposing party contravened the agreements!

Luminance’s conceptual understanding of information goes even further to enhance to streamline your investigation by displaying each cluster of conceptually alike documents as ‘tiles’ on an interactive Heatmap. Each tile is colour-coded according to review progress, ensuring every pocket of data has been evenly investigated.

AI In Practice: Ellex’s Competition Review

Leading Baltic law firm, Ellex, was recently instructed by a client to conduct a competition review of over 70,000 documents. Tasked with searching for examples of communications which could expose the company to any competition risks, the team needed to assess the company’s overall compliance. With only a three-person team assigned to the project and a timeframe of two weeks given to complete the review, Ellex opted to deploy Luminance.

Luminance Discovery’s powerful data culling tools reduced the huge dataset from 70,000 documents to just 600, allowing the team to streamline the project and complete the bulk of their review in only a few days. Crucially, Ellex leveraged Luminance’s unique conceptual understanding of information to identify pertinent information and expose any competition risks amongst the 600 relevant documents. As Kevin Gerretz, Associate at Ellex, commented: “We were very positively surprised by the power of Luminance’s AI-powered eDiscovery technology in comparison to other eDiscovery tools we had used previously. Luminance works extremely well for larger projects and we look forward to using it across our compliance work”.

To watch the full recording of our Antitrust & Competition Law webinar, click here.