Luminance has been selected by the law firm Portolano Cavallo, in the first Italian client win for the leader in artificial intelligence for the legal industry. Portolano will use Luminance’s artificial intelligence technology to improve the efficiency of its M&A due diligence across its Milan, Rome and New York offices.

Portolano selected Luminance after completing a successful pilot of the technology in which they found 35% time savings on document reviews alone. The top-ranked firm will use Luminance to assist its lawyers in dealing with multilingual documents in cross-jurisdictional reviews. As they examine more Italian documents using the system, Luminance will learn by example to recognise Italian clause and document types. These new Italian-language concepts will be made available to all Luminance users in the coming months.

“We found that Luminance shortened the time spent on document review in due diligence by over a third, freeing lawyers for higher value work,” said Yan Pecoraro, Partner at Portolano. “We foresee these improvements in efficiency helping us stay competitive in international M&A deals into the future.”

Luminance, founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, uses machine learning technology based on Bayesian probability theory to speed up contract review processes, such as M&A due diligence, without sacrificing accuracy. The system sorts, clusters and classifies an entire data room on day one of the transaction, presenting it in an intuitive visualisation dashboard, giving lawyers immediate insight and prioritising their reviews. Luminance’s unique ability to detect anomalies ensures that even subtle differences between contracts, which may pose a risk to a transaction, are highlighted to the M&A team at the very beginning of the review process.

“Expanding into another European country and language demonstrates that the technology can add value to the work of lawyers in any jurisdiction,” said Emily Foges, CEO of Luminance. “We are excited to welcome the first Italian firm to publicly use AI for contract review.”

Luminance launched in September 2016 and has customers in 12 countries, having completed more than 120 transactions to date. The company was recently awarded ‘Best AI Product in Legal’ at the CogX AI and Innovation Awards in London.

About Portolano Cavallo

Portolano Cavallo was founded in 2001 by partners Manuela Cavallo and Francesco Portolano. The firm provides legal advice to companies operating in complex and evolving sectors: it is a leader in the Digital, Media and Technology sectors, in addition to being recognized in the Life Sciences and Fashion/Luxury fields.