It’s been a fairly major week of announcements for Luminance, which over the past seven days has unveiled a number of new client wins and a new integration with HighQ.
Wins first, and Australian law firm Gilbert + Tobin has adopted Luminance’s artificial intelligence technology to enhance its due diligence processes for M&A transactions. It is a big vote of confidence in Luminance’s tech by the innovative Sydney-headquartered firm.
“Gilbert + Tobin is committed to embracing innovative technologies that enhance our ability to meet client needs in a cost-efficient manner,” said Sam Nickless, COO and partner at Gilbert + Tobin. “We are excited to be using Luminance, a best of breed AI technology. Amongst other potential applications, Luminance will become a part of our M&A due diligence process, providing rapid insights into documentation that historically took days or weeks to uncover.”
Other wins announced last week by Luminance include Portolano Cavallo, its first Italian client. 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.
Hot off the back of the news that Kira Systems will soon be integrated with HighQ, Luminance on 4 July announced that its AI-backed review software is now fully integrated with the collaboration and data room platform.
The HighQ integration will allow Luminance clients who use HighQ as part of their M&A transaction process to synchronise documents from their HighQ data room with the Luminance system for analysis and intensive review.
“We are excited to announce our collaboration with HighQ as part of our continued mission to make the M&A due diligence process as streamlined as possible for our clients,” said Emily Foges, CEO of Luminance.
Elsewhere LexisNexis UK announced on 6 July that Harper Macleod, one of Scotland’s leading full service law firms, has deployed Lexis Draft to help them reduce the time they spend on drafting, while increasing the quality of their documents.
Lexis Draft is a toolbar that sits in Word and combines LexisNexis content with workflow tools, including advanced proofreading, citation checking, as well as document automation services.
In a quote that would make most law firm marketing managers think they’d died and gone to heaven, Harper Macleod partner Donald Munro said; “There’ve only been two times that I can recall where we’ve introduced a product that made people smile. One was the iPhone – the other was Lexis Draft.”
Kennedys has entered into an exclusive partnership with India-headquartered IT developer Cognitive Computer Services (CCS) in order to help give it more bandwidth to pursue and develop innovative ideas.
CCS, which is based in Technopark, Trivandrum, Kerala, will be primarily focused on technologies such as rapid prototyping, application development, text analytics, machine learning and Blockchain.
Kennedys’ recently appointed head of research and development, Karim Derrick told Legal IT Insider: “I’ve been brought in in part to help develop the innovation that’s already going on at Kennedys of which [virtual defence lawyer] KLAiM is probably the most important. We’re also looking to nurture and develop the next generation of products. The firm really has embraced change and recognises that technology will have an impact. The notion with this new partnership is that, without affecting business as usual or other developments, they can prototype new ideas as they develop.”
In other news, leading intellectual property firm Potter Clarkson is working with Phoenix Business Solutions to move its document and information management infrastructure into the iManage Cloud, having recently migrated to Office 365.
Phoenix has developed a tailored business solution, comprising iManage Cloud and iManage Share, as well as Phoenix MatterView and Workspace Control, with a view to improving workflows and business insight from the firm’s data.
The Nottingham-based firm, which has adopted a strategy to migrate much of its IT infrastructure to the cloud, selected Phoenix, a long term iManage partner, to help with the process after a competitive pitch.
Other iManage wins include California law firm Boutin Jones, which was welcomed in a blog by iManage’s CMO Dan Carmel last week.
And established multi-disciplinary firm, Deo Volente Solicitors, has selected the Proclaim Practice Management Software solution from Eclipse Legal Systems.
Founded in 2007, Deo Volente Solicitors has recently celebrated a decade in business, which it attributes to its reputation of a community focused law firm.
The Bedford firm is implementing the Proclaim Practice Management system firm-wide to cater for all aspects of its service offering consistently. The case management module will reduce the time spent processing each matter, and maintain the high level of client service Deo Volente Solicitors is known for, whilst the integrated accounting toolset will offer the team an enhanced overview of the firm’s day-to-day operations.
New product launches
Microsoft has released a new tool that allows companies to track how teams spend their time. Microsoft Workplace Analytics is now generally available as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan.
It taps into Office 365 email and calendar metadata to shed led on how an organisation collaborates and spends its time. “It turns this digital exhaust – the data that comes naturally from our everyday work – into a set of behavioural metrics that can be used to understand what’s going on in an organisation,” said Ryan Fuller, general manager of Workplace Analytics in a blog last week.
Meanwhile Advanced Discovery, a global eDiscovery and risk management provider, announced the company has filed a patent covering facial recognition technology in eDiscovery workflows. This most recent patent is designed to automate the review of large volumes of photographic images to identify an individual’s presence and prioritise documents within attorney document reviews.
This is the third patent filed by Advanced Discovery this year; the company was also granted a patent in August 2016 for Riskcovery, a portable conceptual analytics platform that identifies potential violations and compliance risks.
“Advanced Discovery is delivering an entirely new class of patented and patent-pending technologies and workflows that feature AI and predictive modeling to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying and forecasting risk – at scale,” said Jim Burke, CEO of Advanced Discovery. “Investments in our people and processes continue to produce new ways to help our clients decrease the complexity and cost of handling the exponential growth in data types and volume. Many are talking about technology-driven innovation; Advanced Discovery is delivering.”
Financial results
As City firms continue to unveil a largely positive set of financial results. Allen & Overy has announced record figures for the year ended 30 April 2017, with revenue up by 16% to £1.52bn and profit per equity partner up by 26% to £1.51m, which it credits in part to its alternative delivery models achieving their strongest year yet.
In a statement ON 7 July, A&O said: “Our range of alternative client delivery initiatives, which includes our Legal Services Centre in Belfast, our consultant lawyer business Peerpoint, the Project Management Office which assists clients in managing complex projects, our online services business aosphere and digital derivatives compliance system MarginMatrix have added significantly to our bottom line in this set of results.
“aosphere had a particularly strong year after a concerted drive to expand its client base beyond banking. The success of MarginMatrix has been exponential, generating income for 18 offices throughout the financial year.”
Aosphere, a subscription-based product that provides clients with analysis and documentation for cross border legal issues, extended its reach to over 340 clients after a concerted drive to expand its client base. Peerpoint has grown to over 200 lawyers in London and AsiaPac, with an increase in demand from clients for placements, while The Legal Services Centre in Belfast now comprises a team of 80.
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In a post last week on data & legal engineering, Wavelength Law’s chief scientific officer, Dr Ben Gardner, discusses how utilising new data structures provides the foundations for legal engineering and transformational innovation. Introducing the Enterprise Knowledge Map, which Wavelength is using to underpin the challenge of organising data into a contextual structure. You can read the blog here: https://legaltechnology.com//latest-news/guest-post-get-your-data-right/