12 October 2021 - UK Top 50 law firm, Penningtons Manches Cooper, has announced a collaboration with leading artificial intelligence platform, Luminance, to provide a specialist data compliance service – ‘PennSIFT’ – to assist organisations facing new UK/EU compliance requirements relating to the cross-border sharing of personal data.

Recent developments in UK and EU data protection law require organisations to review their cross border data transfers and identify contracts that need updating. In particular, transfers from EU to other jurisdictions need to be updated with the EU’s new Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) and transfers from the UK to other jurisdictions need to be updated to ensure they work in the UK context post-Brexit. Transfers from the UK/EU to US currently relying on the EU-US privacy shield also need to be replaced with an alternative method, such as the new SCCs. For many organisations, conducting this review manually is a significant drain on time and resource. Recognising this, Penningtons Manches Cooper has developed PennSIFT using Luminance’s market-leading AI to accelerate this review process and provide a service to their clients that allows them to rapidly review large volumes of contracts and identify those which need to be looked at in more detail for compliance purposes, achieving significant time savings..

Luminance is the only tool on the market to use both supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of data. This pioneering approach means that the technology can be used out-of-the-box, automatically flagging key information such as clauses, document types, anomalies and governing law in any languages. Luminance also holds the unique ability to flag anomalous or non-compliant document and clause wording. Users are able to select a ‘model’ clause or document, with Luminance then visually indicating with red-lining and green-lining the documents and clauses that comply with and deviate from the selected standard.

Joanne Vengadesan, Partner at Penningtons Manches Cooper comments: “We are delighted that PennSIFT has given Penningtons Manches Cooper and Luminance the opportunity to collaborate once more. When designing PennSIFT, it was critical for us to use the right tech to underpin the product and we know that we have that working with Luminance’s market leading AI.” She continues, “With Luminance, we were able to develop a product that enables a quick sifting through volumes of contracts to identify those using existing SCCs, generating an easily readable report that will inform our clients’ compliance strategy and help them to prioritise.”

Luminance’s CEO, Eleanor Weaver, adds, “We are incredibly excited to partner with Penningtons on this exciting new project. Organisations today are faced with an increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscape, and failure to comply with new obligations could result in huge financial, reputational and legal risk for firms. Luminance’s AI is transforming this process with an out-of-the-box, revolutionary tool that is able to immediately analyse and synthesise data and flag key information and risks. This instils organisations with the greatest confidence that no obligation is overlooked.”

Luminance is used by 350 organisations globally, including top-tier law firms, all of the ‘Big Four’ professional services firms, retail giants such as Tesco and manufacturers including Ferrero.

ENDS

About Luminance

Luminance is the leading artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession, with 350 customers in more than 60 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.

About Penningtons Manches Cooper

Penningtons Manches Cooper is a leading UK with offices in the City of London, Basingstoke, Birmingham, Cambridge, Guildford, Oxford and Reading, and overseas network that stretches from Asia to South America through its presence in Singapore, Piraeus, Paris, Madrid and São Paulo. With 130 partners and over 880 people in total, its main areas of practice are dispute resolution, real estate, corporate and commercial, private client and family. The firm’s lawyers have also established a strong reputation in a variety of sectors, particularly private wealth, shipping, technology and property.