AI Case Study

"Portolano Cavallo decided to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) within its M&A department to assist with the organisation and comparison of multilingual documents in cross-jurisdictional reviews. Portolano Cavallo selected Luminance’s market-leading platform after completing a short initial trial of the technology in the firm’s Milan office, becoming the first Italian law firm to adopt AI. Luminance, founded by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, uses machine learning technology based on Bayesian probability theory to speed up contract review processes, such as M&A due diligence, without sacrificing accuracy. The system can sort, cluster and classify an entire data room in under one hour, presenting information in an intuitive dashboard while detecting anomalies that may pose a risk to a transaction. 'Luminance is a platform: a website that allows you to upload documents, contracts or judicial documents and then begins to analyse them by finding the thread that unites or differentiates them,' explains Yan Pecoraro, a partner in the firm’s New York office. Luminance was quickly deployed within the firm as a secure cloud-hosted solution. On an initial project, the firm uploaded over 700 documents, written in Italian, English, French and German, for document review and clause extraction. The language agnostic technology immediately began to organise the data room and identified a number of new clauses. Portolano Cavallo’s lawyers could label these clauses with no technical training at all.