Zulficar & Partners become first Egyptian firm to announce adoption of Luminance

23 December 2020- Luminance, the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, today announced that Zulficar & Partners, an award-winning international dispute resolution and corporate law practice based in Cairo, has adopted its cutting-edge eDiscovery software, as part of the firm’s digital transformation.

Zulficar & Partners, which is regularly ranked as a top-tier law firm by prestigious legal directories including the Global Arbitration Review (GAR 100), Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners, has already established itself as a market leader in Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean regions, with a reputation for offering state-of-the-art legal services for a wide variety of international and domestic corporate and governmental clients. Until now, the firm had relied on internally developed applications to conduct their investigations for arbitration and litigation matters. However, given the increased docket of cases that the firm is handling, the volume and complexity of the documents filed in those proceedings and the need to review these documents within limited periods of time, Zulficar & Partners needed a platform that would allow them to gain rapid insight into their datasets and, ultimately, find the ‘needle in the haystack’ at an accelerated pace. Luminance’s powerful eDiscovery software will enable Zulficar & Partners to gain greater insight into their datasets, all the while saving time, reducing costs and boosting productivity.

Zulficar & Partners recently used Luminance Discovery to analyse over 500GB of data . The scale of the task meant that relying on manual methods or internally developed applications to conduct the review was not an option for the firm’s arbitration team that is prosecuting disputes internationally. Instead, Luminance’s powerful machine learning was able to immediately read and form an understanding of the vast dataset and then display this across a wide number of visual displays, allowing the team to start the review in the most logical and efficient way possible. The Zulficar & Partners team used Luminance’s powerful filtering, search and culling widgets to quickly zero-in on key information. This was further enhanced by Luminance’s AI-powered TAR (Technology Assisted Review) meaning that Luminance was able to learn from the interactions of the legal team to surface similarly-worded documents, and Luminance’s Deep Coding functionality then helped the team to hone in on the most relevant information by predicting and flagging discrepancies in coding behaviour across reviewers. As a result, Luminance was able to help Zulficar & Partners deliver fast and effective advice to their client, with huge time and cost savings.

As well as allowing Zulficar & Partners to drastically reduce the time spent on the project, Luminance’s easy cloud-deployment, intuitive interface and project management tools, including the ability to allocate tasks and track work progression, was of “great assistance” for the largely remote team. Indeed, Zulficar & Partners’ decision to deploy Luminance Discovery comes at a time where many firms around the world are turning to AI technology to enhance collaboration and efficiency across teams whilst working remotely.

Prof. Dr. Mohamed S Abdel Wahab, Founding Partner and Head of International Arbitration, Construction and Energy Groups at Zulficar & Partners, comments, “AI is playing an increasingly prominent role in the delivery of legal services and Luminance is at the forefront of this shift. Crucial to this, is that technology like Luminance is no longer a ‘luxury’ but a necessity for every leading law firm engaged in large and mega disputes.”

Luminance’s Head of Discovery, Orianne Auger, adds: “We are very excited to see that Zulficar & Partners, a leading international arbitration practice, are making innovation a priority by adopting the most cutting-edge solution on the market. It is incredible to see how a firm that has relied solely on manual and internally-developed review processes are now able to gain invaluable insights with just a click of a button.”

Luminance currently supports over 250 law firms and organisations in more than 50 countries worldwide, including all of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms and over one-fifth of the ‘Global Top 100’ law firms. This year alone, Luminance has seen a 70% uptake in the adoption of its ‘Discovery’ platform, with customers such as Dentons, Burness Paull and Portolano Cavallo using the technology to drive efficiency in their eDiscovery processes.

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 over 50 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.

About Zulficar & Partners

Zulficar & Partners is an international dispute resolution and corporate law practice firm based in the Nile City Building in the heart of Cairo, Egypt. It mainly specializes in International Arbitration and Litigation, Mergers and Acquisitions, Banking, Capital Market Procedures and TransactionsEnergy, Project Finance, IT, Construction, Telecommunications, and Anti-Trust, and offers a comprehensive range of legal services to a diverse array of commercial, industrial, and financial clients both in Egypt and internationally. Established in June 2009, the Firm has 11 partners and more than 65 lawyers. Zulficar & Partners is the only Egyptian law firm to be listed in the Global Arbitration Review Guide to the 100 World Leading Arbitration Firms (GAR 100) for six consecutive years. GAR 100 states ‘leading Egyptian Firm amongst the top 100 Firms in international arbitration’. The firm was awarded the c“National Law Firm of the year” (the most innovative law firm of the year) for Egypt at the IFLR Middle East Awards ceremony held at the Burj El Arab, Dubai, on 16 October 2019. The firm was also awarded the “Egyptian Leading Dispute Resolution Practice” by Chambers & Partners at the Chambers & Partners Middle East Awards ceremony held at the Conrad Hotel, Dubai, on 13 November 2019, in recognition of the Firm’s stellar record of international arbitration cases across the globe and the established track record of winning cases under the laws of many jurisdictions including, but not limited to: Egyptian, English, French, Kuwaiti, Libyan, Omani, Saudi, Syrian and UAE laws. Zulficar & Partners was earlier awarded the Global Arbitration Review award for “Mediterranean or North African international arbitration practice that impressed” at the GAR Ceremony held on 29 March 2017 in Milan, Italy. The Legal 500 (2020) states that “The firm is the best in the MENA region, bar none”