12 January 2020- Luminance, the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, has today announced the release of a suite of smart redaction tools which will enable lawyers to remove confidential information with more speed and precision than ever before.

Redacting information from documents has never been a bigger or more necessary task for lawyers: the increasing volume of regional data protection regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) stipulate strict financial penalties for data mishandling, including ensuring certain types of personal information are redacted, especially prior to information transfer or disclosure. Unsurprisingly, conducting redaction reviews using only manual processes is a hugely time-consuming and resource-intensive undertaking.

Luminance’s new AI-powered redaction tool works out-of-the-box to highlight personally identifiable information including party names, email addresses, bank details, passport numbers and social security numbers. Reviewers can also select specific words or phrases and Luminance is able rapidly surface all other examples, allowing lawyers to conduct a bespoke redaction review. Users then have the option to redact each instance of the confidential information through sophisticated key word search and document filtering. By understanding conceptual similarity between terms, lawyers using Luminance for redaction purposes can be sure of the most thorough reviews. Alternatively, using Luminance’s powerful bulk redaction tool, lawyers can select which documents they would like to redact information from, for instance a specific set of employment contracts or the entire dataset, and Luminance is able to fully redact selected information in a matter of clicks.

Recently, top-tier Portuguese law firm, Vieira de Almeida (VdA), used Luminance to conduct a redaction review of over 8,000 documents. Despite it being the first time some team members had used the technology, Luminance’s quick deployment and intuitive design meant the 20-person team completed the 8,000-document redaction project 50% faster than compared to manual methods. Sofia Barata, Principal Consultant at VdA, comments: “With increasing global regulation around data governance, it has become even more important that personal information is treated correctly. Luminance’s powerful AI technology is revolutionising the redaction process, allowing us to review vast swathes of documents and strip out confidential information with a click of button.”

Clementine Fox, Head of Account Management at Luminance adds, “Redaction tasks are often costly, time-consuming and commercially sensitive. Using Luminance, lawyers are able to have more control over the redaction process, whilst also drastically reducing the time spent on their review.”

Luminance is now used by over 300 law firms and organisations across 50 countries in the world. This includes all of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms and over one-fifth of the ‘Global Top 100’ law firms such as Bird & Bird, Slaughter & May and Holland & Knight.

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.