Legora vs Luminance: how they compare in 2026

Everything Legora sells is generative. The Agent plans and executes legal work across the platform's tools, Tabular Review extracts answers from each document into a grid, research answers questions across jurisdictions, and drafting runs in Word, Outlook and the built in editor. An orchestration layer handles tool routing, memory, model selection and guardrails beneath them. Without the models there is no product left to sell.

Luminance uses models throughout contract interpretation, negotiation and portfolio analysis. Luna Crescent specializes in extraction, classification and other repetitive legal tasks, while additional models handle work that benefits from broader generative capabilities. A routing layer selects the model for each task, and separate validation models test important answers. The repository connects agreements and amendments into context for later questions, and negotiation uses prior concessions and approved positions to generate markups. Workflows turn those findings into contract actions across legal and business teams. The October 2026 release added External Sources, which brings cited research from legal sources, the open web and LexisNexis Protégé into answers, and a Template Agent, with New Lumi taking actions across connected workflows in beta. The central service depends on model generated understanding of contractual language and relationships, rather than a template library alone.

Each cell in Tabular Review expands to its reasoning and the source documents behind it, and Portal answers carry links back to the exact source. Legal research works several sources in parallel, ranks them by authority and checks each finding against primary law before the answer returns. The rebuilt research layer runs on an ontology of the law that maps how authorities rank and relate, including amendments and temporal validity, and went live in the United States on 29 October 2026. Legora says three people check every word of that data to reach 99.997 percent accuracy, and that the ontology makes the Agent 40 percent faster. US case law is updated every 24 hours. Its AI native citator, built to a standard set and audited by former publisher attorney editors, is still to come. Legora publishes its BAR benchmark of 5,161 cases across 28 practice areas, last updated in July 2026, and says it has cataloged more than 50 ways AI fails at legal research without publishing the list. No hallucination rate for the Agent's answers is published.

Luna Crescent is tested against ContractIQ Bench, with 189,000 manually annotated data points covering provisions such as liability caps, termination rights and confidentiality. Testing includes unseen concepts and blind review by legal specialists. Luminance claims 5 percent higher accuracy in blind legal expert tests, without naming what that is measured against, and says Luna is four times faster than general purpose frontier models on contract intelligence tasks. Its test harness measures precision and recall, with no absolute result given. Separate validation checks important outputs against model agreement, source evidence and task requirements. A failed check can lead to a retry and a visible request for human review. The model is also trained to identify missing information rather than fill the gap. Public sample tasks, a reproducible evaluation set and detailed error rates are not available.

The Agent proposes a plan before it acts, carries out the work across documents, data sources and tools, checks whether it met the goal, and delivers work product into the project workspace for the lawyer's review and approval. It can also act without being asked, watching email, documents and projects and starting work when something needs attention. Tabular Review adds Mark as Reviewed, Lock Cells and Review Mode for team review, and full audit trails record every tool call, file access and agent action. ISO 42001 covers the AI management system, with human oversight named as a principle. No threshold at which the Agent stops for a person, and no route after a wrong output, is described.

Business users can generate and progress routine agreements under legal approved templates and role permissions, with nonstandard terms routed to legal. Proposed negotiation language appears in Word. For important AI outputs, a separate model or panel checks agreement, supporting evidence and task requirements. Every required critic check must pass. A failed check prompts another attempt using the feedback, followed by a review flag if the problem persists, which sends a doubtful answer back to a person. Customer decisions and workflow actions retain an audit trail. The AI terms require automatic event logs kept for the life of the agreement, interfaces that support human oversight, and corrective action by Luminance when the system does not conform. The agreement requires manual interpretation of all results. An NDA Negotiation Agent that moves routine negotiations forward automatically is announced and not yet live.

Legora's October 2026 Series E release puts use at more than 140,000 legal professionals at more than 2,400 firms and teams in over 80 markets, with more than half of the AmLaw 50 as customers and in house teams above 40 percent of new customers in the third quarter. Named rollouts carry dates. Jones Day took Legora firm wide across more than 2,500 lawyers in 40 offices (October 2026), Hogan Lovells Cadwalader began a pilot with more than 1,300 lawyers in 18 practice teams (October 2026), and Stoel Rives adopted it for about 350 attorneys (October 2026). Linklaters reports that 97 percent of its weekly active users worked in the Agent within a month, and that monthly active use among partners rose from 65 percent to almost 80 percent. Other named customers include White & Case, Crowell, Accor, Dentons Europe, BMW Group, Salesforce and Veolia. The customers page reports that 25 percent of users see better quality work, that experienced users save 80 percent of non billable hours weekly, and that firms bill $6.4 million more per 100 lawyers a year, without a date, sample or method for those figures.

Current customer examples tie specific organizations to contracting work. AMD reports finding precedent language in under two minutes, Emma Sleep reports twice as many contracts reviewed per quarter, and Avianca claims 90 percent less document review time. Repository examples include Yokogawa's 99 percent faster response to business questions and IDEXX finding sanctions ties in 20 minutes. Trench Group ran a tariff analysis in two hours, compared with two weeks and about €11,000. Workflow examples include ProSapient cutting its process from eight steps to three, Fluence reporting 50 percent fewer contract turns and Hitachi moving from NDA generation to signature in under five minutes. The homepage claims more than 1.3 million questions answered and 75 percent less repetitive review work, and adds Staples, Imerys and Cryptomathic to the customer logos. These are vendor presented customer results, without a common study protocol or dated measurement period. The current customer base exceeds 1,000 enterprises.

The general terms bar Legora from using a subscriber's confidential information to train or fine tune AI models and require the same of its subcontractors. The terms, the data processing agreement and the security measures annex are published in versions for the EU and the United States, and the annex covers least privilege access, personnel confidentiality, authorization controls and retention on customer instruction. Ethical walls and role based access are stated to keep confidential information from crossing matters or projects, on access control built on the Zanzibar authorization model, and engineers reach customer data only with the customer's written approval. Privilege and work product handling are not addressed.

Each customer has an isolated environment with separate workloads, data and layered access controls. The agreement treats private learning and outputs as customer property and confidential information, and limits support access to service delivery. It also licenses customer data for product improvements, private learning and usage insights; there is no general prohibition on learning from customer content. Private learning stays with that customer, while nonidentifying usage insights can be retained for improvement. Inputs sent to external models are permitted disclosures directed by the customer. No specific clause protects attorney client privilege or work product, and the model list gives no provider retention limits.

Lawyers, firms and in house teams are the buyers, and the product is described as working with lawyers rather than replacing them, with the Agent's output delivered for a lawyer's review and approval. Legora's Acceptable Use Policy, dated 4 May 2026, and clause 6.1.2 of its EU general terms state that Legora is not a law firm and does not practise law, and the Global terms warrant that its agentic tools include human in the loop review checkpoints. No treatment of competence and supervision duties and no jurisdiction limit appears in the policy, the terms or the product pages, though Legora publishes a list of supported countries.

The master agreement prohibits treating the product as legal advice or a substitute for relevant independent or internal legal advice. All results require manual interpretation, and customers must tell third party users about those limits. AI Systems Terms add human oversight duties and describe the intended use as legal document analysis, research, contract analytics and legal workflows. The product also serves procurement, finance, sales and other business functions, with exceptions routed to legal. Luminance sets out no lawyer competence procedures and no boundaries for supported jurisdictions. The license permits professional services firms to use the software when serving their own clients.

Legora holds ISO 42001 for its AI management system, independently audited with ongoing surveillance, and publishes what the certification covers: how AI is designed, deployed, supervised and monitored, with human oversight and structured governance as the operating principles. No internal owner of AI governance is named, no results of testing on model behavior before release are published, and nothing covers uneven output across matter types, parties or populations.

AI Systems Terms, version 3.0 of 1 October 2026, require ongoing risk management, records of risks and tests, and data governance that considers bias, representativeness and missing data. Model selection ranks candidates on accuracy, speed, reliability and cost, in that order. Luminance says it has tested more than 30 models through a test harness measuring precision and recall, blind comparisons in Luminance Arena and five validation stages. The evaluation process also includes complete workflow testing through ALumNI, blind expert review and a human sign off before a reversible production rollout. Luna Crescent releases must clear ContractIQ Bench and expert review before replacing a current version. Luminance names no individually accountable AI governance owner and gives no results on uneven performance across matter types, parties or populations.

The security measures annex sets least privilege and role based access, and centrally stored logs traceable to unique usernames, with security logs kept at least 12 months. It adds data integrity signing, background checks and confidentiality agreements for staff, and retention as the customer instructs. Subscriber environments are logically separated and full production backups run every four hours. The data processing agreement has Legora report a personal data breach within 36 hours and delete or return personal data at the subscriber's choice when it ends. The subprocessor list, last updated 6 July 2026, names each provider with its purpose, data and residency, and a new subprocessor comes with 30 days to object. Penetration tests cover the full platform twice a year.

Customers can delete data during use, with removal from active stores within 30 days and backups within a further 30 days; faster deletion can be requested. Routine backups occur every 24 hours, remain within the hosting region and are kept for 14 to 28 days under the master agreement. Access follows least privilege, with multifactor authentication, optional single sign on and isolated customer workloads. The subprocessor list of 1 October 2026 names hosting, model, support and operations services, including Intercom and ClickUp. New providers require 30 days notice and allow 15 days to object. The data agreement requires notice of a personal data breach within 24 hours, mitigation and information about the affected records and likely consequences.

General terms and conditions are published openly in an EU version, last updated May 2026, a version for the United States and Global terms dated September 2026. Clause 6.3.2 of the EU terms caps liability at the greater of twelve months of fees or €250,000, and clause 6.3.3 raises it for Enhanced Claims, breaches of confidentiality or the data processing agreement, to the greater of twice the fees or €500,000. The US version has the same structure in dollars, and the Global terms cap at twelve months of fees and twice the fees with no floor. Clause 5.1.1 gives an intellectual property indemnity only, clause 6.2.6 gives no warranty on output, and the Global terms exclude liability for beta features. No indemnity for third party claims arising from output or insurance position is stated.

Version 3.1 of the master agreement, dated 6 October 2026, provides an IP indemnity for the product, with exclusions for unauthorized combinations, continued infringing use and unsupported versions. A performance warranty allows correction, replacement or a refund of unused prepaid fees. General liability is capped at the previous 12 months' fees, rising to three times that amount for specified data obligations. Confidentiality and IP ownership breaches are outside those caps, and certain legally nonexcludable losses remain protected. Claims require notice within nine months. The agreement separately disclaims losses caused by output errors or omissions and treats customer directed model transmissions as permitted disclosures. No insurance commitment is specified.

Document management systems are integrated rather than replaced. Legora reads access rights from the source system each time a user queries rather than caching them at setup, and Intapp Walls for AI and iManage Security Policy Manager enforce matter restrictions. The October 2026 ecosystem release covers reading from and saving back to iManage, NetDocuments, Box and SharePoint, and names Datasite, Intralinks, DiliTrust, Everlaw, Docusign, Ironclad, Agiloft, Slack, Salesforce and LawVu among connected systems. Laurel, Intapp Time and PointOne turn work done in Legora into time entries by client and matter. Add ins bring the Agent and playbooks into Word and Outlook, EDGAR sits among the research sources, and MCP connectors link Gemini Enterprise, Blue J and ChatGPT Enterprise. Partnerships with Sirion, Conga, Avvoka and Ansarada were announced in the second half of 2026, several rolling out in phases or in beta, and an iManage MCP server was announced as planned. Field level mappings for each connector are not documented.

Negotiation generates context based markups directly in Microsoft Word using approved language, earlier concessions and comparable agreements. The workflow product connects contract actions, tasks and approvals across business teams and lets other assistants access contract capabilities through MCP. Lumi MCP, in beta since October 2026, brings Luminance into Slack, ChatGPT and Outlook, and External Sources, live since the same release, brings cited research from LexisNexis Protégé and the open web into answers. The platform also names DocuSign connections. Its technical terms allow uploads from document management systems and virtual data rooms. Connector specific configuration, permission inheritance and the exact fields moving in each direction are not explained. These connections bring AI contract work into existing applications while retaining the central agreement record.

Legora runs separate arrangements for the EU, the United States and Asia Pacific. Its subprocessor list sets out hosting and AI model providers by region, Microsoft, AWS and Google among them, with EU customers' data held in the EU and EEA. For Asia Pacific it separates hosting in Australia from AI model processing in the EU and Asia Pacific, with OpenAI processing in the EU. The security page says enterprise customers control where their data is stored. Storage is tiered to data sensitivity, technical teams in the EU and the United States support local clients, and subscriber environments are logically separated. The regions open to each package and the processing location for every feature are not set out in one place.

The standard hosted product runs in an isolated customer environment on AWS. Customers choose an available AWS data center through the order form, with backups in the same region and recovery objectives of 24 hours for a complete primary data center failure. Additional inference can run on AWS, Azure or Google infrastructure. Azure and Google processing follows an EU or UK hosting choice; for other hosting choices the processing sits in an international location that Luminance does not name. Direct OpenAI API processing takes place in the United States, and a second OpenAI entry, for agentic workflows using Codex, is processed in the EU. Luminance publishes neither the full list of available hosting regions nor the routing of each model task, and a storage choice alone does not fix every processing location.

ISO 27001:2022 with a yearly audit, SOC 2 Type II covering the security criteria and ISO 42001 for the AI management system are all current. The trust center at security.legora.com carries a resources section and a data flow diagram, and the security whitepapers and security measures annex are published without a gate. The security page says penetration tests run twice a year under an assume breach method, while the security measures annex of January 2025 describes them as annual. Customers can bring their own encryption keys, set retention periods and have data deleted when the contract ends. The certifying auditor is not named.

ISO 27001 covers the information security management system for development, sales, support and operation, including the Cambridge technical headquarters, remote workers and cloud processing. Regular SOC 2 Type II examinations sit alongside independent penetration tests. A trust center on Vanta offers the ISO certificates and the SOC 2 report. Contractual measures, in the technical and organizational measures of 1 October 2026, include encrypted storage and transport, nightly operating system updates, daily backups, least privilege access and a dedicated data protection officer. Senior leaders review the security program quarterly, and a security advisory board supports it. Audit information and certificates are also available through the contractual review process. The assurance statements leave out the auditor names, report dates and examination periods.

The subprocessor list, dated 6 July 2026, names Microsoft, AWS and Google for hosting, infrastructure and AI models and OpenAI for AI models, with DeepL for optional translation, Linkup Labs and Exa Labs for web results, turbopuffer for search infrastructure and Intercom for support, each with its residency. New subprocessors are announced by updating the list, with 30 days for the subscriber to object. An orchestration layer handles model selection across tasks. No model or model version is named, and nothing states which provider serves which feature.

Luna Crescent is a family of proprietary legal models built from a general purpose base model that Luminance does not name, with specialist contract training. It works alongside other models selected by task through benchmarks and expert review, from more than 30 tested. The subprocessor register of 1 October 2026 identifies AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for inference inside cloud environments, direct OpenAI API processing in the United States, and a second OpenAI entry for agentic workflows using Codex, processed in the EU. The AI terms distinguish models hosted within infrastructure from requests sent to an external model provider. New subprocessors require advance notice, but Luminance does not name the individual foundation models, their versions or the task routing. No equivalent notice commitment covers every model substitution within an existing provider.

No pricing page or rate is published, and the commercial route is a demo request. The Global terms, dated September 2026, set the charging structure: a Platform Fee plus Credits, with AI features consuming Credits (clauses 1.3 and 2.1.2), and 45 days' notice of a Platform Fee change at renewal (clause 3.1.3). The Credit terms they refer to are not linked from the site. The general terms are published openly, so the structure can be read before a sales conversation even though the figures cannot.

Subscription allowances measure the number of files held in the product, and each version counts as a separate document. Annual uploads are subject to a fair use ceiling of twice the contracted document allowance, regardless of later deletion. Fees, payment timing and the initial term are set in the order form rather than a public rate table. Luminance Corporate is also sold through AWS Marketplace as a private offer on a 36 month term, priced by document count. Renewal ordinarily repeats the initial term unless either party gives 90 days notice. The standard increase ceiling is the annual change in the UK Consumer Prices Index, compounded, plus three percentage points, unless the order form says otherwise. Luminance gives no prices for assisted implementation or extra modules.

Large law firms, small and mid sized firms, in house legal departments, the public sector and professional services are all served, with solution pages for M&A, litigation, banking, insurance, private equity and tax. Multi jurisdiction and cross border work are stated strengths, with research sources across Europe and federal and state law in the United States. No firm size or practice area is named as outside its scope.

Legal, procurement, finance, sales, executive and HR teams use negotiation, repository analysis and workflows across commercial agreements. The license also permits professional services organizations to use the product for their clients and includes terms for United States government customers. The legal suite defines Corporate, Diligence and Discovery applications, while the AI terms describe legal document analysis, research, analytics and related legal workflows. Examples span NDA creation, supplier review, liability positions, tariffs and renewal obligations. Luminance does not set out firm size segments, supported research jurisdictions, language limits or excluded practice areas. Current product positioning extends across an enterprise's contract work.