Startup Luminance introduces an AI assistant for lawyers that can amend contracts and mark up non-disclosure agreements using a proprietary model trained on over 150 million legal documents It’s planned.
The new product, Agent Lumi, will be available for limited testing to customers by the end of the year.
Legal AI is a crowded space with competitors helping lawyers reduce the time it takes to read, amend, and negotiate business documents. For example, Harvey, an OpenAI-backed generative AI tool for lawyers, has generated quite a bit of buzz, while Clio, a tool that summarizes documents and creates invoices, raised a $900 million funding round in July. completed.
Luminance was founded in 2015 by a Cambridge mathematician and initially focused on automating the legal review of contracts. Founding investors include former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, who was acquitted of fraud charges related to the sale of Autonomy, whose superyacht sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily earlier this year. Ta.
The company’s early customers were law firms, which gave the company access to some of the legal contracts it had been working on to train its AI. Luminance CEO Eleanor Lightbody says the combination of in-house legal datasets and custom machine learning algorithms sets the company’s purpose-built AI apart.
Adam Guthrie, Luminance’s founder and chief technical architect, added that the model provides access to “the core of each company” by understanding all of a company’s contracts.
Other companies are getting a head start with so-called agents, which aim to automate decision-making and perform tasks without human oversight. Among other things, Agent Rumi will be pitted against the AI startup Spellbook. Spellbook debuted Associate in August, pitching it as “the first agent fully versed in the practice of law.” Like Harvey and many AI tools, Spellbook is built on the fundamental model of OpenAI.
Agent Lumi launches a year and a half after Luminance introduced its chatbot, Ask Lumi. Generative AI models answer business questions and rewrite contract language.
Earlier this year, Luminance released an automated markup tool that allows you to review contracts, rewrite clauses, and align external contracts to your company’s standards, all independently. That is what Lightbody calls a “passive” agent. As Guthrie puts it, Agent Lumi acts “proactively” and performs multiple concurrent tasks at once through “chains of reasoning.”
“All of these tasks are highly repetitive and automated tasks that will be consolidated to allow us to refocus on adding value and strategic thinking,” Lightbody says.
In contrast to more “generalist” models, Luminance emphasizes that its “legal-grade” AI is trained to prevent hallucinations and mistakes. Luminance says its model is programmed to defer to human experts for things it doesn’t know, rather than confidently giving inaccurate answers like some mainstream models. There is.
Lightbody says this feature is huge for lawyers, where accurate and precise language is essential.
“They trained our AI to give a completely different answer, which means if it doesn’t know the answer, it will tell it to a human who does know the answer,” Lightbody said. And in an effort to build trust, Luminance users will be able to check their agents’ homework, she says. That means having Agent Lumi audit “every step” he takes, including where the information was extracted from in the contract.
“The more we do that, the more we can actually hand over the reins in time,” she said.
But while Luminance touts the capabilities of its new AI assistant, it warns that, like other legal technology, it is just an assistant to human lawyers. Even if something goes wrong, the responsibility lies with humans.
Lightbody added that as Luminance expands into new markets, it is important to work with large law firms early on to acquire new clients.
“They are the gatekeepers of the data, but when a law firm uses our software, their clients also use our software,” Lightbody explained.
Luminance is now reaching customers beyond the legal profession and increasingly targeting its corporate customer base. The UK-based company closed a $40 million Series B funding round in April. The company declined to disclose its valuation in that funding round. Luminance also expanded into the United States, opening an office in Dallas and ramping up hiring on the West Coast. Currently, more than one-third of its annual revenue is generated in the United States.
Lightbody added that expanding business operations will only improve the quality of the product. What makes this technology work is the change in data, not just increasing the size of a static repository of information.
“AI knows that a change in control clause can be written 100 different ways, but it can also be written another way,” she explained.
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