Demand for Luminance’s AI increases as businesses face surge in Subject Access Requests

10 March 2021- Luminance has announced a 75% surge in uptake of its pioneering ‘Discovery’ platform as businesses experience a huge influx of Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) arising from data protection legislation such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act).

DSARs give individuals the opportunity to request access to all of the information an organisation holds about them. Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of requests has risen significantly as increasing numbers of employees are laid off or furloughed. Without technology, conducting a DSAR review is a time-consuming, complex task and despite the impact of Covid-19, organisations are still expected to complete a request within 30 days or face a fine of up to 4% of the company’s annual global turnover. The number of DSARs is expected to increase even further as the UK Government’s furlough scheme starts to be scaled back and employers have to consider terminating employment, leading to many former employees exercising the right of access to understand why they have been selected for redundancy.

Leading law firms such as Dentons and Burness Paull are turning to Luminance’s AI technology, which can automatically identify personally identifiable information within vast datasets, to cope with this rise in demand for DSARs. For some law firms, their adoption of Luminance has now allowed them to offer their clients a specialised DSAR service that was previously not possible due to the amount of resource required for such a review, in turn giving rise to new sources of growth and profitability.

Most recently, Burness Paull used Luminance to conduct a DSAR, searching through over 6,000 documents. Luminance’s unique combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning could read and form an understanding of the dataset, helping the lawyers cull 80% of the dataset and quickly focus in on what mattered. With Luminance’s advanced search tools, the team were then able to quickly identify information relating to the subject, reducing their overall review time by half, instilled with the utmost confident that nothing had been missed.

Speaking at an event hosted last month by Luminance, Sam Moore, Innovation Manager at Burness Paull, commented: “We recently saw a spike in DSARs from our clients who had received such requests from former employees. A lot of our clients were struggling with the amount of resource they needed internally to ensure compliance. Technology like Luminance Discovery allowed us to very quickly to get high level view of what’s in that data source… This meant that within 24 hours be able to say to the client what was needed for the review. We found that to be very popular with clients and really helped with their budget.”

Speaking at this year’s Legal Week, Tanja Podinic, Global Director of Innovation Programs at Dentons, was already using Luminance for a number of other reviews. She explained that whilst “the volume of DSARs before the GDPR was much lower”, the impact of the regulation caused the number to surge. Turning to technology to assist them, “our in-house team repurposed Luminance for the DSAR problem and it was a breath of fresh air, helping us to cut time spent on a DSAR review significantly.”

Eleanor Weaver, General Manager at Luminance, added: “Today, people are incredibly ‘data aware’ and this raises the stakes significantly for organisations in terms of data privacy compliance. As the only technology that can be used from the first day of deployment, Luminance’s AI technology transforms a potentially costly and time-consuming exercise, allowing users to identify key information almost instantaneously and comply with the stringent requirements set out under legislation such as the GDPR and the CCPA.”

Luminance is currently used in over 300 law firms and organisations worldwide. This includes all of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms and over one-fifth of the ‘Global Top 100’ law firms such as Holland & Knight, Bird & Bird and Slaughter & May.