Document Processing in
Government & Law

The document processing industry is subject to ever-increasing demand for document management and document protection services— the government and legal fields in particular are required to maintain document security by law which often requires balancing these security focuses around the ability to present or locate original documents on demand. Unencrypted document databases, document imaging or document scanners do not provide sufficient document integrity and document security in the legal field.

Your firm is likely increasingly asked by clients for digital copies of documents, as originals are destroyed according to document retention and document destruction policies. You may be asked for document copies by litigants or other attorneys, or even court staff in the case of highly significant documents. The problem is that most common document management systems do not allow you to securely store document images in their native or easily queryable formats, which means adding significant time and cost to a key function of your business and operations. Documents present in the legal field need protection like any other sensitive information that needs to be securely stored or transmitted over the internet; if document integrity is to be preserved, intelligent document processing software and document scanners are required for document imaging which allows document image storage as a document and not as an image file format (e.g. TIFF, JPEG).

Automating the extraction of text and populating it into the appropriate field in a database is the answer to these myriad business problems faced by those in the legal and governmental fields, but it’s a complex process. Every document, even those of the same type, has a different layout, so an automated text extraction system needs machine learning support to teach itself to recognize data so it can be added to the database correctly without human intervention.

In this same vein, data security is paramount in the legal fields— meaning the sharing of documents outside an organization’s permissible parties has led to increasingly large manual document processing teams inside law firms and government agencies to circumvent the possibility of privileged information being disseminated outside the broader organization. The wins of automated and automation-assisted document processing systems become apparent in these cases; ensuring total transparency to a document’s journey from intake to archiving and validation steps to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and hurdles.