In keeping with a drive among vendors to be able to offer both transactional and contentious document review capability, Luminance, which has since its launch in September 2016 grown its M&A client base to 118 customers in 39 countries, has released Luminance Discovery to assist lawyers in their investigations and eDiscovery work.
Simply called ‘Discovery’, the new tool will use machine learning to help speed up the review process and Kimberley Davies, who joined Luminance as head of discovery in July, said: “In applying the latest developments in machine learning to Luminance Discovery, we are able to offer lawyers a really efficient approach to investigations, allowing them to manage and sort huge volumes of data quicker than ever before.”
Technology assisted review (TAR) in the UK is still a relatively new thing – the High Court only approved its use for the first time in 2016. Also referred to as computer assisted review or predictive coding, TAR means the computer learns which documents are relevant and reduces the set of documents for human review. This year saw the first English contested court order for the use of predictive coding in the document review process: in the case of David Brown v BCA Trading Limited, Berwin Leighton Paisner (as it was before its merger with Bryan Cave), acting for BCA, were given the go ahead to use TAR despite opposition from the other side, in a case that made it to trial.
However, in the US TAR has been in use much longer after Judge Andrew Peck in his February 2012 decision in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe & MSL Group judicially accepted for the first time the use of TAR.
The eDiscovery space is crowded and competition is fierce: RelativityOne customers can now transform workspaces into a heavyweight contract review solution for one.
Turning the tables, Luminance CEO Emily Foges said: “We are bringing the trademark benefits of Luminance to the eDiscovery market. Our Discovery tool is intuitive, offering a clean and interactive user interface which makes data room visualisation simpler than ever. By deploying an uncomplicated technological solution to investigations, litigators are going to see a real difference to how much more effectively they can work from the outset.”
However, vendors would do well not to underestimate the degrees of separation between a transactional and litigation team in practice. Sounding a note of caution Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner partner Oliver Glynn-Jones, who led the BCA case for the firm told Legal IT Insider: “The processes are not massively dissimilar but they are very different disciplines. Despite the technology looking the same what we require is very different and can’t be one size fits all.”
For a timeline of which courts allowed TAR when, here is Chris Dale: https://chrisdale.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/approval-of-technology-assisted-review-in-courts-around-the-world/