6 April 2022 | One of Europe’s largest business software providers, Visma, has adopted Luminance’s AI-powered legal process automation tool as part of its M&A due diligence reviews, as the Oslo-headquartered company looks to continue its rapid growth trajectory.

Visma has experienced strong growth in recent years, propelled by an increased demand for its cloud technology solutions during the pandemic, as well as M&A activity including a record 42 acquisitions in 2021. This M&A activity has increased the workload within the company’s in-house legal department, as the team reviews large volumes of data when assessing acquisition opportunities and analysing areas of risk and opportunity.

Challenged with balancing speed of execution and thorough analysis, Visma have chosen to adopt Luminance’s next-generation AI to both enhance and expedite their legal M&A due diligence. Luminance uses AI to read and form an understanding of contracts, labelling a range of key information, clauses and concepts relevant to any due diligence exercise. Crucially, Luminance's AI also highlights what is missing in contracts, such as clauses that Luminance would expect to be present within that contract type but aren’t, or missing pages within agreements. Luminance’s AI helps businesses such as Visma to rapidly identify and assess potential risk, providing them with all the information necessary on day one to make informed decisions about potential acquisition targets and distribute their resource effectively.

Of particular interest to Visma is Luminance’s document comparison tool, which allows reviewers to select ‘model’ documents or clauses, and then compare this version against other documents or clauses within the data room. Luminance’s AI will then red-line and green-line all instances of differences and similarities between various documents. This powerful comparison tool makes it possible for teams to identify deviations in wording across thousands of documents – something that is virtually impossible to detect via manual methods of review.

As the only language- and jurisdiction-agnostic tool on the market, Luminance can work in any language from day one. This will allow Visma, which maintains offices across Europe and Latin America and frequently operates in multi-lingual, cross-border matters when conducting M&A transactions, to seamlessly review and analyse documents in Dutch, English, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish.

Hjalmar Florijn, Head of Legal at Visma Benelux, comments: “As Visma continues to experience rapid growth, it is critical that we can instantly understand the contractual landscape of an acquisition target. With Luminance, our in-house legal teams will be able to uncover critical findings earlier in the review process, giving us confidence that we have been appraised of all possible risks and allowing us to plan our business strategy accordingly. This rapid insight will also help us to keep more M&A work in-house and reduce reliance on external counsel.”

Eleanor Weaver, CEO of Luminance, adds: “I am delighted that Visma has chosen to adopt Luminance. As the only language agnostic AI tool on the market, Luminance can provide value to legal teams all around the globe, making it a truly indispensable tool for multinational organisations dealing with multilingual datasets and needing rapid answers to their most complex business questions.”

Luminance is trusted by over 400 organisations in 60 countries, including one quarter of the Global Top 100 law firms, all of the Big Four professional services firms as well as corporate customers such as Tesco and Ferrero.

ENDS

About Visma

Visma is a leading provider of mission-critical business software for a more efficient and resilient society. By simplifying and automating the work of companies and organisations of all sizes, we improve people's everyday lives. With 14,000 employees, 1,135,000 private and public sector customers across the Nordics, Benelux, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and net revenue of €1,741 million in 2020, we are committed to making tomorrow better than today. Visit us at visma.com.

About Luminance

Luminance is the world’s most advanced AI technology for the legal processing of contracts and documents. Founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Luminance’s AI reads and forms a conceptual understanding of documents in any language. Luminance uses this understanding to augment the spectrum of legal matters, from AI-powered contract drafting, negotiation and review to investigations and eDiscovery. Luminance is used by over 400 customers in 60 countries, including all of the Big Four consultancy firms, a quarter of the world’s largest law firms and multinational organisations.