By Tom Saunders, RSGI
Today (27th January) Luminance announced what it is calling its “most significant product update to date”, enabling the tool to retain negotiation history and decision-making across a company’s contracts. Graham Sills, co-founder and director of AI at Luminance told Legal IT Insider: “Until now, legal AI has been all about evaluating and assessing snippets of text, having a view over the entire system of contracts has not been possible.”
This update is possible thanks to advances in technology. Sills says: “The reasoning power and context length of LLMs is doubling every few months and the amount of data a model can store in its short-term memory is increasing all the time.” He says the clever part is what Luminance calls “recursive legal context engineering” where as its AI processes a query, it may realise it needs to know customer history or other pieces of information, and can bring these in on demand.
One area where this new “memory” will have an impact is in contract negotiation, as Luminance is now able to read a whole agreement, align it with a client’s standard terms and review the negotiation history in real time. Luminance estimates that these negotiations will be 10% faster than the 70-80% efficiency gains the tool offered before, and is claiming it will give legal departments 30% of their time back. On how these figures are arrived at, Sills says: “We measure how fast it takes us to carry out a negotiation. This can be put alongside what customers tell us about how long it takes them to do a negotiation. It is consistently in that 90% faster range.” Elaborating on the 30% figure, Sills says Luminance “looks at the average makeup of an in-house legal team and who is doing what. You can draw conclusions about where all this context is and what you have to ask other people for in order to get the contract together before negotiation. It is data that has been reported to us.”
The company is also expanding rapidly. While Sills didn’t share revenue figures, he said it had more than doubled last year. The business reports a 40% headcount increase which has largely gone to global expansion of the UK-headquartered company. Sills told Legal IT Insider: “R&D is always a focus, but the headcount does not increase rapidly there, the growth is concentrated in pre and post sales roles in the States.”
The news follows Harvey’s announcement on 8th January of its memory feature, which operates similarly. Harvey’s product announcement was focused toward law firms and has not been released to customers yet as it works through data privacy and governance challenges with law firm customers. Luminance’s update focuses on the benefits to in-house legal teams and has been piloted with Deloitte, Quantinuum, Ingram Micro, Baringa and others and will be made broadly available from 25th February.
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