Slaughter and May has teamed up with Luminance, which is being backed by Autonomy founder Mike Lynch’s investment fund, to help launch new artificial intelligence (AI) for M&A.
The elite London law firm has tested and piloted new software founded on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Luminance is being backed by Invoke Capital, a technology investment fund backed by Lynch.
Created using the input of Slaughter and May lawyers, in order for the technology to ‘learn’ the most probable human decision on due diligence work on M&A, the technology allows the work to be carried out at much greater speed. The technology is anchored in Recursive Bayesian Estimation theory, which allows robots to continually update their most likely position on data and information.
Luminance chief executive Emily Foges said: ‘Luminance has been trained to think like a lawyer. With Slaughter and May’s help, we are designing the system to understand how lawyers think, and to draw out key findings without the need to be told what to look for. This will transform document analysis and enhance the entire transaction process for law firms and their clients. Highly-trained lawyers who would otherwise be scanning through thousands of pages of repetitive documents can spend more of their time analysing the findings and negotiating the terms of the deal.’
Steve Cooke, senior partner of Slaughter and May, added: ‘The legal due diligence process is ripe for the revolution that Artificial Intelligence offers. It is clear to us that the brains and technical capabilities of the Luminance team, backed by Mike Lynch and his Invoke Capital fund, are a winning combination in this area and one with which we are delighted to be collaborating.’
Slaughter and May has a long history with Lynch, with Cooke having acted as lead adviser on Autonomy’s infamous £7.1bn sale in 2011 to what was then Hewlett-Packard.
Lynch concluded: ‘It is not an understatement to say that this is an application of Artificial Intelligence that will completely transform the due diligence process, which is perhaps long overdue. Invoke is delighted to be backing Luminance and we are particularly pleased that it is collaborating with Slaughter and May – a law firm which leads the way when it comes to innovation and quality of service.’
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk
For more on artificial intelligence see the feature: ‘Deep Blue sky thinking: The cutting edge of legal AI’