In a business environment where we assume every document is digitized, the legal profession still utilizes paper to an unexpected degree. Word processing software, image scanning, eSignatures, OCR, IDP, RPA and, most recently, AI, have all collaborated through the years to reduce paper consumption and increase efficiency in courts and law firms, but many workflows still begin with a written document on paper with information attorneys and judges need to make decisions.
Most participants in the legal system have begun the process of transitioning to a world without paper. But pick 10 of them at random and they’re likely at different points on that journey. Automation Today recently sat down with executives from Xerox, a company whose history and evolution positions them extremely well to serve organizations at every stage of that journey.
Newton Peters and Matt Molnar each have been with Xerox for more than two decades. They have seen the evolution of a system reliant on paper to one that leverages AI and automation to reach previously unimaginable gains in productivity and efficiency. While Xerox serves the legal system comprehensively from IT services to print management to customer engagement to managed services, Peters and Molnar are focused on how process automation—now powered by AI—fits into the company’s offering.
While there are hundreds of processes any court or law firm might want to automate to wring out time or cost savings from its operations like billing or onboarding clients and employees, one that is especially important to legal professionals is contract review.
Molnar, director of AI and Intelligent Automation Sales at Xerox, notes that the company’s technology, which features intelligent document processing (IDP) and robotic process automation (RPA) guided by AI, can capture these incredibly dense documents, categorize them, summarize them, identify relevant keywords and, even further, sentiments in the phrasing that might elude a human reviewer. And, based on those identifications, the results can be fed into an automated workflow or presented to a legal professional who uses the information to make a decision or take an action.
Another example Molnar raises involves litigation notices, the 1-2 page written communications used to notify individuals or organizations of pending or potential legal action.
“We have a firm we worked with that receives around 500,000 litigation notices per year, so about a million pages that could have details about claims, parties, deadlines or required actions,” he remembers. “This is unstructured data that needs to be inputted into their business application. They had 27 employees that worked on this who would take an average of six minutes to read each litigation notice, extract the data that was needed and get that into their system. It was a cumbersome, time-consuming process that resulted in backlogs and errors. We were able to implement intelligent document processing utilizing the power of AI to read the unstructured data on these notices, identify those key elements, extracts them and automatically enter them in the application, while also doing a duplicate check. In this particular case, we took it from six minutes on average per document to around 30 seconds.”
This translates into nearly 50,000 labor hours per year saved by the firm, Molnar says, and enables those employees to work on more valuable tasks while streamlining a necessary core process.
One of Xerox’s big differentiators for law firms of all sizes, according to Peters, are the multifunction devices that integrate with the automation capability outlined by Molnar. But, while customers benefit from having Xerox devices on premises that integrate naturally with industry-focused automation capability, he points out that it’s just one of multiple ways to ingest documents into the company’s IDP platform.
“The multifunction device is still highly relevant today,” says Peters, who serves as vice president of Managed and Digital Services for Xerox. “Though many people see it as a utility rather than an actual agent in the field. Our AI-enabled devices and our IDP-enabled devices become a node where I can scan documents, have the AI or IDP extract the information and insert that right into an automated workflow or into a case management system, never actually printing or storing anything.”
And, while the familiar piece of office hardware remains relevant, Peters explains, Xerox’s managed services offering means documents can enter the system via mobile phone, tablet or laptop as well.
“You’re sending stuff into an automated workflow without having to print, accept a fax or scan,” he says.
While the multifunction device may remind people of the old days of collating stacks of documents and avoiding paper jams, Molnar stresses that the machines that help connect to Xerox automation services are one part of an AI technology revolution whose story isn’t yet complete.
“When it comes to AI, we’re in the very early days and it’s important to us that we implement the technology responsibly,” he says. We have a very strong focus on our clients. To that end it’s crucial to maintain the most up-to-date ethical guidelines and navigate this AI landscape in the right way—helping our clients really leverage the technology while still maintaining the regulatory compliance that is the basis of the legal profession.”
