Vieira de Almeida deploys Luminance’s artificial intelligence for M&A

Continental Europe News

21
Aug
2018

Editor

Portuguese law firm Vieira de Almeida (“VdA”) has selected Luminance’s artificial intelligence technology to streamline the firm’s contract review and due diligence processes for transactions.

VdA is an international law firm recognised for its innovative and cutting-edge approach to top-tier legal advice. The firm selected Luminance following an extensive trial period, where Luminance was tested against a manual due diligence review of an M&A transaction. With over 2,000 English and Portuguese documents uploaded to the data room, VdA benefitted from Luminance’s intuitive interface, which provided detailed insight into clause and document types, regional activity, and potential anomalies.

VdA´s Team were closely involved in the learning process of Luminance by showing the platform clauses and documents that improve the platform’s understanding of Portuguese. It was an opportunity for VdA’s Team to shape how Luminance would look and act, ensuring that the resulting system met the firm’s high standards for technology.

“Technology is changing the way transactional due diligence is conducted and we are pleased to have found an advanced solution to meet our contract review needs. Our goal is to be able to spend time focusing on the recommendation to our clients that we would otherwise have spent detecting the issues. We don’t anticipate replacing the role of lawyers working on contract review or due diligence, since lawyers are still required to manage, analyse and identify material issues and to verify the analysis. Luminance frees up our lawyers’ time so that they can focus on legal analysis and complex problem solving, helping on uncovering what we do not already know.” said Sofia Barata, Lawyer and the AI Project Coordinator at VdA. “Luminance’s powerful machine learning technology and its ability to learn from the interaction between our lawyers and the platform and to understand new Portuguese legal concepts is truly revolutionary, and we are delighted to be pioneers in the Portuguese market.”

Rui Alves, Chief Information Officer at VdA, added: “At VdA, we view innovation as a key differentiating factor, which is why we anticipate the future by developing cutting-edge solutions. Luminance’s plug and play technology seamlessly integrated into our lawyers’ existing workflow and allowed the deal team to quickly begin the due diligence review. Ultimately, the technology will enhance our current processes, freeing up time for the creative and analytical thinking that our clients value so highly.”

VdA is now rolling out Luminance to be used on all relevant due diligent assignments in parallel with clause and document type labelling in Portuguese language.

“We are delighted to be working with pioneering firms such as VdA,” said Emily Foges, Luminance’s CEO. “With M&A transactions increasingly involving multiple languages and jurisdictions, the firm recognises the importance of this new era of machine learning, that is truly language agnostic. We are excited to see the efficiency and insight gains that Luminance can deliver in Portuguese.”