What Do Legal AI Co. Luminance’s Latest Client Wins Mean?

Legal AI company Luminance has continued to expand its client base with two new wins, one in Indiana, USA, Ice Miller, and one in Edinburgh and London, UK, Dickson Minto. But what does it mean?

The moves show two things: first that legal AI tech for due diligence is not only attractive to the largest firms in key markets, for example Ice Miller has around 340 legal professionals across the country, making it one of the smaller US law firms to have adopted AI.

Meanwhile, Dickson Minto, while having a stellar reputation for private equity and corporate work is also relatively a small firm compared to the City giants it often competes with.

This suggests that the broader legal market is seeing the economic and strategic benefits in adopting legal AI systems, especially for transactional work. In short, once the largest firms make use of AI tech ‘normal’ then everyone else has to follow or else look out of step.

The second point is that Luminance appears to be picking up a lot of the medium size firms around the world, of which there are clearly more in total than multi-billion dollar global firms. While often being very highly ranked firms, Luminance’s clients also tend to be ‘independent’ firms.

Is there some kind of market division now starting to form amongst the legal AI companies? And, if so, what’s driving it? Are certain legal AI companies offering payment systems that allow firms with smaller M&A teams to feel confident they won’t have to pay too much? For example, Luminance is keen to tell potential clients they have a ‘pay what you use’ model, as opposed to demanding very large licence fees.

What is clear is that legal AI tech is spreading now all across the main legal markets of the world, while in places such as the US and UK, which have been early adopters, the uptake is now becoming widespread and moving far beyond the largest corporate firms. For example, earlier this week Bristol, UK, firm TLT, hooked up with US legal AI company, LegalSifter, including taking a financial stake in the tech business.