Leading Dutch firm Houthoff Buruma is deploying Luminance’s contract analytics technology to improve the efficiency of its due diligence process in M&A transactions.
Luminance, which competes with the likes of RAVN Systems and Kira Systems, automatically reads, compares and analyses the contents of a large data sets. Its ability to spot anomalies and unusual clauses can highlight documents of potential concern, giving lawyers the ability to prioritise their work more effectively.
According to a release published today (26 January), in deploying Luminance, Houthoff Buruma has found significant reductions in the time spent reviewing thousands of documents in transactions. The technology reads and understands legal documents, using unsupervised machine learning to identify clauses and categorise documents by a broad range of criteria, including contract type and language. Intuitive collaboration tools include task assignment functions and automatic report generation that contribute to speeding up the review process.
Houthoff Buruma is now rolling the system out to its entire corporate department. The firm anticipates expanding its use cases to include in-house knowledge management, clause extraction and conducting compliance projects on behalf of clients.
“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.”
Luminance launched in September 2016 after collaborating intensively with its first client, Slaughter and May. In December, Luminance announced that it had been valued at $20m after receiving an undisclosed sum from Talis Capital. It received £3m in investment in September 2016 from Invoke Capital, the tech investment vehicle set up and run by former Autonomy founder Mike Lynch.