Company: Luminance
Founder: Eleanor Lightbody
Website: https://www.luminance.com/
Business: Luminance is the world-leading AI platform for legal process automation, revolutionising the way lawyers understand, negotiate and analyse their contracts.
About Eleanor and Luminance
Founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge in 2016, Luminance is the world-leading AI platform for legal process automation, revolutionising the way lawyers understand, negotiate and analyse their contracts. Luminance’s AI is trusted by over 500 organisations across 60 countries.
The exponential growth of data means that lawyers are frequently expected to review thousands of documents for most ‘small-scale’ reviews, let alone bigger projects like criminal investigations. This challenge is compounded by a complex regulatory landscape where non-compliance can result in astronomical financial penalties and reputation damage, as we have seen with GDPR breaches. Furthermore, this labour-intensive review work is commonly associated with the mass burnout of junior lawyers, which currently plagues the legal profession.
Luminance’s AI can be used to dramatically cut review time by surfacing and labelling key information such as clauses, dates, parties, governing laws and even anomalies like deviations in clause wording. The US biotechnology giant, IDEXX Laboratories, used this novel AI approach to analyse over 20,000 contracts across their supply chain to identify any ties to recently sanctioned entities in March 2022, completing the review in just 20 minutes.
Luminance can also be used to identify that ‘smoking gun’ buried within thousands of documents. One Top 50 UK law firm used Luminance for an investigation into a contractor suspected of using illegal materials during construction. On day one, Luminance identified incriminating evidence on a photograph of a bottle label that had been undiscovered for two years during manual review. Luminance also made history as the first use of AI at the Old Bailey after barristers’ chambers, The 36 Group, used the technology to analyse over 10,000 documents ahead of a high-profile murder trial, saving £50,000 during the disclosure phase alone.
Luminance’s R&D team continues to find new ways AI can be applied to aid legal understanding. Last year, Luminance launched a new product for in-house legal teams – the first AI in the world capable of automatically taking a review of a contract under negotiation, which colour-codes to what extent each part of a contract is compliant or non-compliant according to an organisation’s standards and external regulations. Having increased the customer base for this revolutionary product tenfold since the start of 2022 alone, with signings including Koch Industries, Luminance plans to further expand into the in-house legal market in 2023.
Faced with the challenge of scaling quickly enough to meet customer demand, Luminance has experienced tremendous success this year, with its YOY growth having increased fivefold since the start of 2022. Luminance has expanded its headcount by 125%, also opening brand-new offices in New York and Singapore. The US now accounts for the highest-value contracts signed in company history, and in 2023 Luminance will seek to further increase its US headcount capitalise on this nascent market.
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