Machine learning-backed due diligence tool Luminance has secured another continental European client, as leading Norwegian firm BA-HR deploys its software to speed up the corporate review process, including tagging clauses in Norwegian.
Luminance, founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge and backed by Mike Lynch’s investment vehicle Invoke Capital, uses machine learning technology to automatically read and understand the contents of a data room. Its advanced anomaly detection highlights differences between contracts so that M&A teams can prioritise their work, focusing on the most concerning or risky documents.
Since November, BA-HR has used Luminance to analyse four live M&A data rooms containing thousands of documents in several languages. The firm spent considerably less time reviewing the data sets than they estimated would have been needed to complete the review without Luminance. The BA-HR team were able to use Luminance’s in-built clause training capability to tag clauses in Norwegian as they reviewed documents. This learning is then retained and rolled-out across different projects.
“Luminance has already proved its worth as part of the toolkit we wish to have at hand for significant M&A and capital markets projects, where due diligence is part of our scope of work,” said Svein Gerhard Simonnæs, a partner at BA-HR. “At the moment it is most useful for English language documents, but even improves the work on documents in other languages. We look forward to the day when we can have Luminance do the same for Scandinavian languages as it does for English now. I am confident Luminance and other information analysis tools will raise the bar for how due diligence should be done and will appeal to the most ambitious and talented lawyers.”
Luminance launched in September 2016 and is currently being used by law firms in eleven countries globally, including leading Dutch firm Houthoff Buruma, which signed up at the start of the year. Luminance was developed in conjunction with Slaughter and May.