Proof positive that legal AI tech has spread around the world was in evidence today as leading Thailand firm Weerawong, Chinnavat & Partners announced that it had become the first law firm in the South East Asian country to deploy Luminance, the UK-based legal AI company.
Formerly the Bangkok office of global law firm White & Case, Weerawong C&P became an independent Thai law firm in 2009 and has a team of 15 partners, plus over 85 lawyers. That may not be a giant by US or European standards, but, it’s a top-ranked firm and the fact that it is now adopting automation for review work is proof of how global the market for legal AI technology is now.
It will be using Luminance for document review work, such as due diligence review in M&A deals. Luminance has bagged several other law firms in the Asia-Pacific region, including in Singapore where it has a new base, as well as Australia and New Zealand.
Chinnavat Chinsangaram, Senior Partner at Weerawong C&P said: ‘We are a firm that embraces innovation and we achieve results for our clients by implementing strategies that have not been previously approached. Luminance allows us to transform our due diligence processes to create a more efficient system and deliver an even better service to our clients.’
‘Luminance recognises the patterns in any language and does not need to be trained, which is essential in the multi-lingual data rooms we normally deal with,’ Chinsangaram added.
The lack of need for training before getting meaningful results appears to break with established norms for the use of some legal AI technology, which tends to need lawyer input to train up the system to identify certain clauses and provisions – that is unless pre-set NLP search criteria have been developed already in that language. It is understood that Luminance believes that clients can get plenty out of the system ‘on the job’ as they analyse document stacks, identifying patterns, similarities and anomalies in the documents that reveal useful insights without the need to train beforehand.
How much the law firm then needs to spend time in training up the system later, or in ‘curating’ the findings, to gain more granular insights and to improve accuracy remains unclear. Feedback from some law firm users suggests they do still wish to train the system on top of any ‘on the job’ insights Luminance can provide.
Emily Foges, CEO of Luminance, added: ‘We’re excited to be working with pioneering firms like Weerawong C&P. Deploying Luminance in Thailand is further evidence in how it can help the global market.’