Leading London barristers’ chambers, The 36 Group, adopts Luminance’s eDiscovery technology for murder case

Award-winning London barristers’ chambers, The 36 Group, recently deployed Luminance’s leading artificial intelligence platform to assist them in reviewing over 10,000 documents in preparation for a high-profile murder court case.

Friday, 10th July 2020 Posted 4 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The 36 Group, which comprises over 150 barristers, mediators and arbitrators, decided to adopt Luminance Discovery for a historical murder investigation in which they act for the defence. Typically, lawyers and judges will use the Crown Court Digital Case System (CCDCS) to access, prepare and present information for court proceedings. However, the defence team found the CCDCS lacking in ability to provide an online platform with remote access to evidence, unused material, correspondence, court orders and defence material such as to enable the entire team (consisting of barristers, solicitors and a multitude of expert witnesses) to work together to review the dataset; the CCDCS also lacked the collaborative tools and intuitive user interface that this complicated case demanded.

The 36 Group thus turned to Luminance’s cutting-edge eDiscovery platform, which uses a unique blend of supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of documents, no matter how vast the dataset. After a rapid upload process, Luminance graphically displays its understanding of the data in an intuitive, interactive 3D visualisation. Users can explore the visualisation to quickly and easily find pertinent documents, assisted by powerful data culling and filtering functionality which helps teams cut irrelevant data in just a few clicks. Further, when exploring the documents, users can ask Luminance to show all conceptually similar results, making sure all relevant information is found as quickly as possible and no key information goes undiscovered. Indeed, without the assistance of machine learning technology, finding all important legal arguments, witness statements and other crucial issues would have taken weeks.

Rowan Caffull, The 36 Group’s Chief Operating Officer, comments: “The bar holds a critical role in upholding the rule of law, therefore investing in a technology which will allow our lawyers to work faster and with more insight is crucial. Further, as an intuitive and user-friendly platform, Luminance is a tool which could be adopted by every member of the team, from silk and junior to instructed experts.” He continues, “Luminanc’s flexibility in setup and pricing was also very attractive to us, as it allows us to innovate in a way that is tailored to our working practices.”

With the defence team all working remotely due to Covid-19, Luminance’s cloud-based deployment was vital, ensuring that all team members could access the platform and begin their investigation right away, as well as negating the need to access physical documents. The 36 Group were also impressed with Luminance’s collaboration and project management tools, enabling the team to automatically allocate documents to colleagues, ensuring no duplication of work effort and allowing them to track review progression in real time.

“We are thrilled to welcome The 36 Group as our latest customer,” added Jason Brennan, acting CEO of Luminance.“When a case comes in, legal teams need a technology that can be deployed and is ready to use within hours. Luminance Discovery is allowing litigators to analyse and cull huge quantities of data within minutes, meaning they can get to the crux of the investigation as early as possible.”