Eversheds Sutherland Ireland has joined its Italian and London offices by adopting a machine-learning contract-analysis tool. 

Luminance is an AI platform for the legal profession, currently used by 300 law firms and organisations globally, including over one-fifth of the ‘Global Top 100’ including Bird & Bird, Slaughter & May and Holland & Knight.

It has seen a 65% increase in the uptake of its technology by Irish firms in the last six months.  

Its machine-learning technology reads and forms an understanding of documents across practice areas, including: due diligence, contract negotiation, regulatory-compliance reviews, property-portfolio analysis, and eDiscovery.

Luminance has offices in London, Cambridge, New York and Singapore.

M&A due diligence transactions

Eversheds Sutherland, which has clients such as PayPal, Nestle SA and Microsoft, previously relied on lengthy manual-review methods to analyse contracts ahead of M&A due-diligence transactions.

Growing data volumes, along with earlier deadlines, made it unfeasible for the corporate legal team to read these datasets in their entirety. 

Luminance estimates time and cost savings of up to 90% in a review with its technology, which is language-and-jurisdiction agnostic.

Eversheds IT director Nicholas Eustace said: “Luminance’s powerful AI technology is set to completely transform the way we conduct our M&A due-diligence and contract reviews, ensuring that we are able to find answers faster, and deliver proactive and informed legal advice to our clients.

Insight

“With Luminance’s flexible machine-learning approach, we are able to gain unparalleled insight into the totality of our documents, confident that nothing has been overlooked. This is client service at its best, and we are excited to roll Luminance out across our corporate legal work.”

Eleanor Weaver of Luminance said that AI was a transformative and essential asset for law firms looking to best advise their clients and maintain operations.