Legal Document Capture

We've talked over and over in this blog about Document Capture previously in this blog. But this time we are going to focus on legal document capture which, in short, is taking capture technologies like OCR, document auto-tagging or keyword extraction to the legal sector.
The law industry in the US is huge. It's one of the largest of the world. In fact the US produces 38,000 new lawyers every year. Some say that the US has more lawyers than the rest of the world combined, although this has not being confirmed.

Well the fact is the problem is there. Thousands of lawyers using paper. And the lawyers here in Silicon Valley, the guys from Fenwick & West, DLA Piper, SNR Denton or the likes deal with contracts that are being sent through courier everyday.

Around North San Jose I see tons of Iron Mountain and Recall trucks, loaded of paper I guess.
There are some solutions addressing this problem. Since long ago, document management solutions like Hummingbird (acquired by OpenText) and Autonomy (acquired by HP) have tried to solve the problems of law firms with not much of a success. Not even law firms have been able to build good enough products over platforms like Sharepoint.

But the problem is really simple: reducing labour force and concentrating in your hardcore value: legal expertise. And the redundant labour force is very clear: the so called "Executive Assistants" or EAs, in a 1 for every 2 lawyers ratio. Things like receiving letters or emails, or even answering the phone (which escapes our scope and has been already addressed).

Take a look at one of the ways that we are trying to tackle this problem using Athento with this video:

Legal Document Capture from Athento on Vimeo.

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