Legal AI doc review company, Luminance, has said goodbye to its most recent CEO, Jason Brennan, who has now left the company. He has been replaced by Eleanor Weaver, who previously worked at another Invoke Capital-connected company, DarkTrace.
This will be the third CEO at Luminance since June 2020 when the well-known legal tech figure, Emily Foges, left to join Deloitte. Brennan, who is based in the US, was heading the company locally when he took on the top role in an acting capacity. He has now left to lead the National Arbitration and Mediation organisation in New York.
The new CEO of Luminance, Weaver (pictured above), officially joined a couple of months ago without much publicity. She was a divisional director at DarkTrace, the cybersecurity business which is just about to have its IPO, and is also heavily backed by Mike Lynch’s Invoke investment group.
In a statement to Artificial Lawyer, Luminance said: ‘We are delighted to have Eleanor Weaver take on the leadership role at Luminance. Eleanor brings to the role a wealth of experience in building and leading best-in-class AI companies and has already achieved our best quarter in the company’s history. We wish Jason all the best in his new role and look forward to another exciting year for Luminance.’
In an internal blog post to mark her joining as CEO, Weaver mentioned: ‘My main focus will be growing out the business. We have had a 40% increase in customers in 2020 and I want to continue onboarding new customers at this rate. In particular, I want to see corporate legal teams using Luminance more.’
She added: ‘I think that there is [a] continued ‘challenge’ of educating lawyers on how Luminance improves and builds upon existing practices. The Covid-19 crisis has also meant that budgets need to be spent wisely. However, I actually think that this provides an opportunity for Luminance because of the efficiency gains of using the technology.’
Is this a big move? It had always felt that Brennan was not going to be at Luminance forever. In fact, with his role as CEO – albeit in an acting capacity – and adding the time spent as President of the US side of the business, Brennan was there for a total of one year and nine months.
It is also understandable that Luminance has hired someone who already was part of the same stable of Invoke-backed companies. In fact, if you visit their main office in London the businesses seem to blur together there, at least that’s how it looks from the outside.
Longer term, what does this mean for Luminance? The company has done a good job in winning clients, and as the recent AL TV Product Walk Through shows, it’s got a very workable product. The reality that a number of clients don’t use it as much as they could therefore remains a conundrum that Weaver will no doubt be focused on.
As to a future change of strategy, it looks like Weaver and Luminance will continue on the same path overall, but as mentioned with more focus on selling to corporates, plus more of a push toward selling their litigation tool, Discovery.