OFLS recently held the final workshop event of its Legaltech 101 Series which provided practical insights into the growing role played by artificial intelligence (AI) in law. The event, held in collaboration with the Oxford Law Society, featured an interactive session with Zara Ryan, a legal product expert at Luminance.

Luminance is primarily a document review platform which provides intelligent solutions for due diligence as well as litigation, arbitration, and investigation. Traditionally, document review has been a tedious, manual process. However, AI has provided a powerful tool in improving efficiency through digital processing. Moreover, it can sort data and find distinct patterns that may be overlooked during manual processes.

Despite its promise, AI applications can be difficult and time-consuming to properly train. They often require customisation depending on the specific type of review undertaken. And users of the technology must be adequately trained to effectively use it. Therefore, these hurdles may prompt lawyers to be hesitant in embracing this new technology.

Luminance seeks to overcome these difficulties by providing lawyers AI technology with a simple user interface, along with unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques. Zara highlighted the use case of a document review project completed for accounting firm EY, where an otherwise four-month long review process took only two days using Luminance’s technology. Similarly, in an M&A due diligence project undertaken for Halsen Legal, 70 hours were saved on completing administrative tasks using its AI technology.

Zara provided attendees with a practical demonstration of Luminance’s technology by completing a document review of emails to find evidence of fraud. Firstly, during the unsupervised stage, the emails were filtered and organised in order to support analysis. Secondly, the application transitions to the supervised stage where deep learning is activated and the relevance of the remaining documents for review is predicted.

Zara spoke about the power of technology in empowering junior lawyers with adaptability and efficiency - traits that law firms wholeheartedly appreciate. She is optimistic about the future of AI in law, not only as something that benefits work, but as an increasingly essential feature of it. Law firms are beginning to recognise AI in this way, which, in the long term, might induce a shift away from the traditional billable hour system towards more efficient solution-driven processes.