-[22 April 2020]- During this time of severe economic uncertainty and disruption, Luminance’s ground-breaking machine learning solution is being adopted by leading law firms and organisations who need to perform quick, thorough and collaborative document reviews whilst working remotely.

Lawyers are facing unprecedented demand for their counsel as businesses consider their contractual positions stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. To help in this process, legal professionals worldwide are relying on Luminance to provide them with fast and robust assessments of the risks and commitments contained within often vast sets of documents. Currently, a key question for most businesses is whether Coronavirus constitutes a force majeure event such that a party is excused from its contractual obligations. Global Top 10 law firm, Dentons UK, have advised that using Luminance will allow them to search for force majeure clauses within huge volumes of contracts. With the assistance of Luminance, it is easy to set this phraseology as a model or standard against which all other documents are compared, ensuring no risk or obligation goes unnoticed in the wake of the pandemic. Any clause or document can be chosen as the model, allowing the direction of the review to be governed by the lawyers in charge.

Joe Cohen, Practice Development & Innovation Manager at Dentons UK, explains this further: “At Dentons, we pride ourselves on embedding innovation and next-generation legal delivery into all aspects of our business. That is why we have implemented Luminance. In this case we are using it to identify force majeure clauses across vendor contracts... We can quickly establish which contracts pose the biggest risk when it comes to COVID-19 preparation.”

Luminance facilitates a quick and thorough review by uniquely combining both supervised and unsupervised machine learning in order to read and form an understanding of a corpus of documents. By employing the most advanced algorithms, Luminance instantly surfaces all crucial information and risks, with no prior machine training required. As Manuela Cavallo, the founding Partner of top-tier Italian law firm, Portolano Cavallo, comments: “At Portolano we have had an influx of requests from clients who want to understand their contractual rights and obligations in light of the Coronavirus. Using Luminance, we are able to proactively identify risks, as opposed to reactively, allowing us to mitigate risks ahead of the problem arising.”

Similarly, last month a ‘Big Four’ accounting firm recommended using Luminance to quickly identify relevant clauses within documents, explaining that during the current Coronavirus crisis, the need for quick reviews where nothing is missed is why Luminance remains invaluable to the organisation. Indeed, Luminance’s core intelligence, the Legal Inference Transformation Engine (LITE), uses advanced machine learning that adapts to every action a lawyer makes, meaning that the time-savings are exponential- for example, last month, the very same professional services firm was able to achieve a 70% time saving for a contract review by using Luminance’s technology.

As well as gaining total document visibility, Luminance is being used to meet another challenge that many countries across the world are facing: remote working.

Leading Scottish law firm, Burness Paull, recently used Luminance’s eDiscovery platform to conduct a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). Midway through the review, social distancing measures due to COVID-19 forced the organisation to begin work from home. Because Burness Paull were already using Luminance, this posed little issue - Luminance is primarily deployed in the cloud, allowing the rapid upload of large document sets from any location. As a result, despite the initial disruption, Burness Paull was able to complete the entire review in record time.

Samuel Moore, Innovation Manager at Burness Paull, adds: “During this critical period, technology has never been so important. Lawyers are trained to reduce risk and using Luminance’s machine learning, we are able to maintain workload capacity and meet tight deadlines.”

Luminance’s built-in tools for collaborative working are pivotal for efficient remote working – for example, a senior Associate at a Global Top 50 law firms was able to achieve an 80% time saving just by utilising Luminance’s project management capabilities. These include features such automatic task allocation and document distribution tools to eliminate duplicative work and real-team information about work progression to ensure a seamless and co-ordinated review across teams, offices and firms.

Luminance is now used by over 230 law firms and organisations worldwide, including all of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms and one-fifth of the ‘Global Top 100’ law firms.

About Luminance

Luminance is the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession. Founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Luminance has developed the Legal Inference Transformation Engine (LITE), the first true application of machine learning to the legal industry, combining pattern-recognition technology with supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and understand human language. Luminance is used by law firms and in-house teams in 48 countries around the world to improve processes such as due diligence, contract negotiation, regulatory compliance reviews, property portfolio analysis and eDiscovery. The company has offices in London, Cambridge, New York and Singapore.