18 May 2021- Leading UK and ‘Global Top 200’ law firm, Stephenson Harwood, has been utilising Luminance’s market-leading AI platform to enhance the way it conducts legal due diligence for high value strategically important M&A deals.

Stephenson Harwood was looking for ways to quickly and efficiently get insight into the totality of documents before an M&A transaction. The firm was impressed with Luminance’s ability to ‘slice and dice’ key information on an intuitive home screen, highlighting important data points and key clauses such as change of control clauses and governing law. Further, the firm was seeking technology to assist with reviews allowing its lawyers to provide mutually beneficial efficiencies for the firm and its clients. Since adopting Luminance, the firm has used the technology to expedite and enhance insight for several M&A Corporate matters, including one of the firm’s largest recent due diligence reviews which contained over 4,000 documents. With Luminance, Stephenson Harwood’s legal team was able to quickly identify key risks and review some standard template documents faster, leaving more time for high-value analytical work, and enabling an increase in scope of work for clients.

As a firm that frequently operates in multi-lingual, cross-border matters, the fact that Luminance is a language-agnostic platform, which facilitates smooth cross-jurisdiction collaboration, was of critical importance. And with most of the legal team working from home, the firm particularly benefitted from Luminance’s collaboration and project management tools, including the ability to allocate tasks, track progress and share findings seamlessly, both internally and with the client.

Stephenson Harwood is now expanding its use of Luminance into different departments within the firm.

Paul Orchard, Head of Innovation at Stephenson Harwood, said: “With Luminance, our lawyers are delivering the highest quality advice drawn from the entirety of the data room. Critically, we are unearthing key points earlier on in the review process, allowing us to feed back to our clients faster than ever before – this is highly valued in time-pressured reviews such as legal due diligence. With Luminance, we aren’t wasting time trudging through volume, but instead can spend more time on advice and strategy, the areas most valued by our clients.”

Eleanor Weaver, CEO of Luminance, added: “Luminance is enabling firms of all sizes to give more thorough, insightful and rapid advice than ever before, and we’re delighted to welcome another world-leading law firm such as Stephenson Harwood to the growing list of customers deploying our next-generation technology for high-stakes M&A transactions.”

Luminance is currently used by over 300 law firms and organisations in over 50 countries. The company was recently listed in Tech Nation’s Future Fifty Cohort, joining previous winners and world-leading technology companies including Darktrace, Revolut and Babylon Health.

About Stephenson Harwood

Stephenson Harwood is a law firm with over 1100 people worldwide, including more than 180 partners. Consistently rated as one of the UK’s leading law firms and ranked as one of the Global Top 200 law firms, Stephenson Harwood is committed to achieving the goals of its clients - listed and private companies, institutions and individuals.

About Luminance

Luminance is the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, currently used by over 300 law firms and organisations in over 50 countries. Luminance’s machine learning technology reads and forms an understanding of documents, helping lawyers to perform the most thorough and rapid document reviews across practice areas including due diligence, contract negotiation, regulatory compliance reviews, property portfolio analysis and eDiscovery. Luminance has offices in London, Cambridge, New York and Singapore.