Despite the macro challenges that 2021 has posed for businesses and individuals alike, Luminance has experienced a year of change and hyper-growth like no other. With 2022 just around the corner, we have cast our gaze back over the past twelve months to reflect on Luminance’s various milestones, ranging from product launches and new markets to pioneering developments and prestigious honours.

Introducing Corporate: AI for GCs

Among our proudest achievements of 2021 was the launch of Luminance Corporate, specifically designed to assist General Counsel and in-house legal teams at every stage of the contract lifecycle, from drafting and negotiation to understanding the key features of executed contracts.

Of course, developing Corporate was no mean feat! Luminance’s core intelligence needed to be able to recognise and understand every component within a clause down to the individual word, so that it could take a first pass review of an incoming contract. In developing this sophisticated capability, Corporate is the first AI technology in the world that can actually provide an initial review of an incoming contract, indicating via a traffic-light colour coding system which clauses are acceptable (green), worth reviewing (amber) or non-compliant (red).

All of this can be accessed within Microsoft Word: lawyers can open their contract from any location, and they can see this traffic light analysis as part of their regular workflow. With Corporate already fully integrated with Word and Outlook, prepare for a whole host of new integrations in 2022!

Now, we are proud to count world-leading corporates such as Tesco and Avianca Airlines among our valued customers, and Corporate will bring value to organisations wherever computer meets contract. As Tim Shirley, Senior Legal Counsel at Ferrero, commented upon Corporate’s release: “By allowing in-house legal teams to rapidly understand all aspects of their contracts, Luminance helps to reduce time, resource and money, pushing legal teams to think and work differently and to help to shape the business for the future.”

AI-Powered Document Review Goes Global

2021 also saw Luminance’s AI become embedded in more than 350 organisations across 60 countries, with major customer signings this year including Tesco, Ferrero and Delta Capita.

Remote working, the increasingly complex regulatory landscape and ever-growing data volumes are just a few of the challenges that can no longer be tackled by outdated working practices. In fact, with multinational organisations and law firms needing to both understand respond to the new regulations constantly being introduced across jurisdictions, Luminance’s language-and-jurisdiction-agnostic technology has proved more essential than ever.

This was precisely the case for the in-house legal team at flagship Colombian airline, Avianca, who used Luminance across documents in eight different languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Thanks to Luminance’s supervised machine learning and language agnostic technology, Avianca was able to create bespoke tags in any language with a single click - for example, when the team noticed an important ‘Proveedor’ (provider) party clause in Spanish. Luminance retained this learning and extended it across the entire dataset, flagging all other examples of the clause!

With increased demand for Luminance’s technology in the APAC region, machine learning support was introduced this year for non-Latin script languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, too.

Catering for Changing Business Needs

This year alone, Luminance’s next-generation machine learning has not only achieved up to 90% time-savings for firms such as Troutman Pepper and Dentons, it has also been deployed across the entire spectrum of document review, from M&A due diligence and Brexit-related assessments to criminal investigations and contract negotiation.

Of course, many law firms continue to deal with cases relating to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and this includes a significant number of force majeure reviews. This was the case for the world’s largest law firm, Dentons, who deployed Luminance Diligence for a review of real estate agreements during the height of the pandemic. Thanks to Luminance’s unmatched AI search capability, the team was able to identify a crucial force majeure clause on day one of the review – this was a clause they had not even expected to find!

Notably, 2021 has also seen firms take on an increased number of contract consolidation exercises. With Luminance’s interactive spatial widget, users are provided with a visual representation of exactly what contract templates exist, quickly highlighting deviations from standard wording and templating. Australian law firm, Lander & Rogers, used this feature to consolidate almost 70 different types of contract template down to just 6 models. Joel Kennedy, Transformation & Process Improvement Consultant, commented: “AI is providing a real solution to the problem of contract consolidation, allowing lawyers to quickly understand the intricacies of their contracts but in a way that is easy to digest, efficient and extremely insightful.”

Ultimately, responsiveness is key to Luminance’s product development and 2021 saw the company’s R&D team work tirelessly to introduce a suite of product developments designed to help customers with the most pressing needs of the day.

Just one example of this is Luminance Discovery’s automatic PII detection and redaction tool. With data and privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA continuing to pose challenges to organisations, lawyers can now feel confident that nothing confidential goes unredacted as Luminance will automatically recognise patterns of language to highlight text that may constitute PII within a document.

A Technology Leader

Luminance was delighted to cap off this year with a number of awards recognising the development teams and business growth. Particular highlights must be our inclusion in the Tech Nation Future Fifty, which places Luminance alongside fellow frontrunners in British innovation born out of the UK’s pre-eminent research and science base, the ‘Best AI Product for Legal’ at the CogX awards and ‘Hot AI Company of the Year’ at the IT World Awards. Meanwhile, having joined Luminance as CEO at the beginning of 2021, Eleanor Weaver was named among Management Today’s 35 Under 35 and was further honoured with an Innovation Trailblazer Award at Law.com’s 2021 Legal Innovation Awards.

Looking Ahead to 2022

Appetite for our technology shows no signs of waning, especially as fresh challenges loom over the legal industry in the form of ESG reporting, regulatory compliance pressures, unprecedented data volumes and the evolving role of GCs. With an expanded product suite, we are excited to continue leading the way when it comes to optimising the work of lawyers and businesses with AI.