Norway’s BA-HR using Luminance’s artificial intelligence for due diligence

Continental Europe News

24
Mar
2017

Editor

BA-HR, one of Norway’s leading law firms, has widely deployed Luminance’s artificial intelligence technology to improve the efficiency of its transaction due diligence, saving significant amounts of time in the review process.

Luminance, founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, uses machine learning technology to automatically read and understand the contents of a data room. Proprietary algorithms sort, cluster and classify legal documents, giving lawyers a fast insight into the overall contents of a data room, presented in an intuitive interface with a visualisation dashboard. Luminance’s advanced anomaly detection highlights even subtle differences between contracts so that M&A teams can effectively 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.”

“BA-HR’s confidence in our AI technology has enabled them to work more efficiently and effectively than before, underlining the benefits Luminance can bring to law firms worldwide,” said Emily Foges, CEO of Luminance.

Houthoff Buruma is now rolling the system out to its entire corporate department. They anticipate expanding its use cases to include in-house knowledge management, clause extraction and conducting compliance projects on behalf of clients.

Luminance launched in September 2016 and is currently being used by law firms in eleven countries globally, including Slaughter and May and Houthoff Buruma.