Luminance has launched the most significant update in its ten-year history, introducing a redesigned Legal-Grade AI architecture that retains negotiation history and legal decision-making across every enterprise contract. The upgrade addresses a longstanding blind spot in contract management systems, which traditionally captured final outcomes but failed to preserve the reasoning and context behind those decisions.
A New Architecture for Connected Contract Intelligence
The updated platform connects negotiation context, workflows, and analytical insights across the entire enterprise contract portfolio. This means organisations can now access the accumulated intelligence of past negotiations, eliminating repeated work and preventing the “context loss” that often slows legal and commercial processes.
Founded in 2015 by AI researchers from the University of Cambridge, Luminance has dedicated a decade to building domain-specific legal AI. Its new system reframes contracts not as administrative documents but as strategic intelligence assets embedded with organisational memory.
Why Specialisation Matters
Graham Sills, co-founder and director of AI, previously explained that Luminance’s early decision to specialise in legal AI has become a defining advantage.
“We’ve spent a decade building deep legal expertise and domain-specific models. 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.”
This foundation now powers a platform capable of retaining and reasoning over years of contract history, knowledge typically lost in traditional systems.
The Origin Story: From Highlighters to AI
The company’s founding insight came from Sills’ firsthand exposure to how junior lawyers were spending their time.
“They’d spent a huge amount on their education, and in their first years they were basically given a highlighter pen and told to read contracts all day. It felt like a problem technology could solve.”
That problem became the basis for a platform now used by more than a thousand organisations globally.
The ‘Legal Brain’ of the Organisation
Luminance’s multi-agent system automates workflows from contract creation and negotiation to risk review and compliance. It understands clause structures, evaluates commercial impact, proposes edits, and learns from every interaction.
According to Sills, the platform functions as the “legal brain” of an organisation.
“Everything you would normally go to your general counsel for, you can now access through AI agents, supported by humans.”
He shared an anecdote of a customer who, returning from holiday to an urgent legal task, used Luminance to complete a complex contract review in minutes rather than hours—an example of what he called “transformative” time savings.
With the new platform, Luminance reports it can now reduce contract negotiation time by up to 90 per cent.
Ending ‘Enterprise Amnesia’
Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, described the core challenge the upgrade solves:
“Enterprise amnesia is real, and it’s costly. Whenever it’s time to renegotiate a contract, executives ask: Who agreed to this, and why? Our new platform remembers, reasons, and stays with the work in perpetuity.”
This persistent reasoning capability differentiates the system from other AI tools that offer momentary insight but lack continuity.
Record Growth and Global Expansion
The platform upgrade follows a period of strong commercial performance. In 2025, Luminance doubled global revenue for the second consecutive year, with North America alone growing 127 per cent year over year and securing the company’s first eight-figure enterprise contract.
Its headcount expanded more than 40 per cent across the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia. Over the past year, Luminance analysed more than 18 million contracts across industries and jurisdictions, data that continues to refine its models.
Availability
Luminance’s re-architected Legal-Grade AI is now live in beta with design partners and will be broadly available from February 25.
