Dr. Mike Lynch: After Dark Trace, Luminance

September 19, 2016

I read “Time for Robo-lawyer? Mike Lynch backs Cambridge Law-Tech Start-Up Luminance.” The founder of Autonomy worked his magic on Dark Trace. I write a short description of Dark Trace as part of the Commercial Tools section of Dark Web Notebook. With that firm up and growing, Dr. Lynch is now backing smart software to replace human lawyers. With Dr. Lynch’s experience in the rarified atmosphere of the legal eagles, his new venture makes sense. Use software to trim the wings and perhaps the legal fees of the savvy litigators, tort specialists, and interpreters of wild and crazy laws.

According to the write up:

Founded by a combination of lawyers, experts in M&A and mathematicians Luminance’s technology is based on R&D from Cambridge University, and is anchored in Recursive Bayesian Estimation theory. Obviously. It harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to automatically read and understand hundreds of pages of detailed and complex legal documentation every minute. This offers companies the ability to carry out essential due diligence work with much greater speed.

Yep, Bayesian, Markovian, and Laplacian methods are about the fatten Dr. Lynch’s bank account again.

I highlighted this passage:

Luminance has been trained to think like a lawyer,” said CEO Emily Foges. “With Slaughter and May’s help, we are designing the system to understand how lawyers think, and to draw out key findings without the need to be told what to look for. This will transform document analysis and enhance the entire transaction process for law firms and their clients. Highly-trained lawyers who would otherwise be scanning through thousands of pages of repetitive documents can spend more of their time analyzing the findings and negotiating the terms of the deal.

One wonders how Hewlett Packard would have turned out if HP kept Dr. Lynch and let him fix the old time Sillycon Valley icon. Well, I wonder. I don’t think Meg Whitman spends much time thinking about Dr. Lynch until the court date in 2017. Perhaps Dr. Lynch will license Luminance technology to HPE so Meg Whitman can understand the value of Dr. Lynch’s approach to business. On the other hand, HPE may embrace OpenText Recommind. That new Luminance stuff may not make Meg Whitman comfortable.

Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, News, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.