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The new Legal-Grade AI architecture connects negotiation history, legal reasoning, and commercial decision-making across every contract, closing a long-standing gap in enterprise systems.
Today, Luminance launched the largest update to its Legal-Grade AI platform in the company’s ten-year history. The new architecture retains negotiation history and legal decision-making across all enterprise contracts, addressing a long-standing gap in contract systems that captured outcomes but lost the context behind decisions.
Luminance’s platform now connects the context for contract negotiations, workflows, and analysis across the entire enterprise portfolio.
Founded in 2015 and developed by AI experts from the University of Cambridge, Luminance’s Legal-Grade AI redefines enterprise decision-making, turning contracts from an administrative burden into strategic intelligence.
The value of specialisation
I spoke to Graham Sills, co-founder and Director of AI, last year at Web Summit, who told me, “I’m very glad we specialised early.
“Our advantage is that we’ve spent a decade building deep legal expertise and domain-specific models.
This means that if your entire product depends on a general model whose licensing or capabilities change, it creates real business risk. Specialisation gives us a much stronger foundation.”
The problem that started it all: Highlighters in law firms
Regarding the impetus for the founding of Luminance, he recalled,
“Some of my friends had studied law and were very excited to go and work in big law firms.
They’d spent a huge amount of money and effort on their education, and in their first few years they were basically given a highlighter pen and told to read contracts all day, every day.”
He thought it was a “terrible waste of talent and time”, and it felt like a problem that technology could solve. “At the time we wouldn’t even have called it AI, but that’s how we ended up building a company focused on specialised legal AI.”
The ‘legal brain’ of the organisation
Luminance’s multi-agent platform automates entire workflows, from creation and negotiation to risk review and compliance. It understands clauses, evaluates legal and commercial impact, takes action, and learns from every negotiation, becoming increasingly attuned to your business.
Today, Luminance is used by over a thousand organisations worldwide.
Sills shared:
“We think of it as the ‘legal brain’ of the organisation — everything you would normally go to your general counsel for, you can now access through AI agents, supported by humans.”
For example, if you want to understand how something like Trump’s tariffs affect your business, traditionally that would take weeks — reading different contracts, working with analysts, pulling everything together. With Luminance, it can take minutes.” There’s also negotiation.
For simpler agreements like NDAs or service contracts, Luminance has shown that two AI agents can actually negotiate with each other.
“We’re not quite ready as a society to remove humans from the loop entirely, but a huge amount of the work can already be automated.”
Sills shared a customer anecdote: a customer returned from holiday and realised he was supposed to review a master service agreement, with a deadline in 2 hours. Normally, that would have taken four or five hours at least.
According to Sills:
“He put the document through Luminance, checked it against his company’s risk criteria, and within about five minutes had enough confidence to make a decision and sign. That kind of time saving is transformative.”
For a decade, Luminance has cut contract negotiation time by 70-80 per cent. With this relaunch, that jumps to 90 per cent.
Further, these capabilities have expanded with the new upgrade. With institutional contract knowledge now available throughout the enterprise, legal teams can regain over 30 per cent of their time.
Solving ‘enterprise amnesia’
According to Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance:
“Enterprise amnesia is real, and it’s costly. Whenever it’s time to renegotiate a contract, executives ask: Who agreed to this, and why?
Current AI systems are helpful at the moment, but become disconnected over time. Our new platform remembers, reasons, and stays with the work in perpetuity, which distinguishes it from anything else on the market.”
In 2025, the company’s global revenue doubled for the second year, with North America growing 127 per cent YOY, including its first eight-figure enterprise deal.
To support this growth, Luminance’s headcount grew by over 40 per cent across the UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States.
Over the past 12 months, Luminance analysed 18M+ contracts across jurisdictions and industries.
Luminance’s new Legal-Grade AI launches in beta to design partners, with broader availability from February 25.