Luminance, a pioneer of artificial intelligence for the legal industry, today announced that law firm Houthoff Buruma is deploying Luminance’s contract analytics technology to improve the efficiency of their due diligence process in M&A transactions.

Luminance automatically reads, compares and analyses the contents of a large data room, giving lawyers an instant view of the size and complexity of the transaction. Its unique ability to spot anomalies and unusual clauses can highlight documents of potential concern, giving lawyers the ability to prioritise their work more effectively.

In deploying Luminance, Houthoff Buruma has found significant reductions in the time spent reviewing thousands of documents pertaining to a transaction. The technology uses unsupervised machine learning to identify clauses and categorise documents by a broad range of features, including contract type and language. Intuitive collaboration tools include task assignment functions and automatic report generation that contribute to speed up the review process.

“Using Luminance, we work faster and look forward to taking on more mergers and acquisitions and due diligence work,” said Jan-Paul van der Hoek, Head of Houthoff Buruma's M&A practice, “Luminance provides excellent value in reducing the time we spend on a transaction, so we can spend more time on valuable advisory work, and less on time-consuming document review. It was also important to us that Luminance works seamlessly with Virtual Data Room providers such as Intralinks.”

Emily Foges, CEO of Luminance said, “We are excited to be working with another of Europe’s leading corporate law firms. Houthoff Buruma has seen the proven benefits Luminance brings through its powerful artificial intelligence contract analysis and will be using the system for future M&A transactions.”

Houthoff Buruma is now rolling the system out to its entire corporate department. They anticipate expanding its use cases to include in-house knowledge management, clause extraction and conducting compliance projects on behalf of clients.

Luminance launched in September 2016 and recently announced a $20 million valuation after investment from Talis Capital.

About Houthoff Buruma

Houthoff Buruma is an independent and long-established Netherlands based law firm with over 290 lawyers, civil-law notaries and tax advisors and provides premium legal advice worldwide. With offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, London and New York, Houthoff Buruma advises an extensive international client base. Houthoff Buruma is the only firm in the Netherlands that is a member of the international Lex Mundi network.