16 March 2021- Luminance, the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, has announced a surge in the uptake of its machine learning technology by ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms in 2020, providing further evidence of alternative legal service providers’ increasing willingness to encroach on the traditional domain of law firms.

The rise of ‘Big Four’ firms PricewaterhouseCoopers (‘PwC’), Deloitte, Ernst & Young (‘EY’) and KPMG as innovative legal services providers has become a hot topic in the legal industry. Indeed, with the accounting firms’ global scale, willingness to embrace the latest and most advanced technology and years of experience providing advisory, tax and audit services, they are frequently in a prime position to bid for work traditionally reserved for larger law firms.

Luminance’s award-winning machine learning platform has been at the forefront of this shift and has been deployed by offices of all of the ‘Big Four’ for nearly two years.

Luminance’s General Manager, Eleanor Weaver, said: “The ‘Big Four’ are not afraid of embracing innovative technology to get their clients the results they deserve and it is therefore unsurprising that we have seen a huge increase in the uptake of our technology in recent months. I believe we will see this trend continue into 2021 as ALSPs up their game in order to thrive in the new, digitally-transformed legal industry.”

Founded in 2015 by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Luminance is currently used in over 300 law firms and organisations across 55 countries.

To see Luminance's Legal Week panel with representatives from Ernst & Young, Dentons and Mayer Brown, click here.

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.