Digitization of Historical Decisions
Situation:
SunLexis was approached by one of the leading legal technology companies based in Canada. The client provides technical solutions to lawyers that will facilitate access to the legal materials. It is one of the pioneers of the free access to law endeavors.
The client wanted conversion of around 6500 historical decisions from scanned files into a properly stylized and formatted word document which would be published on web. This task was to be completed in a space of 12 days.
Challenge:
There were manifold challenges in the project:
- One of the first concerns was that the decisions dated back to 1940s and 1950s. Due to this, the scanned quality of the TIFF files sent to us was not that good. This meant that the OCR specialists had to put in extra efforts to ensure that we were able to convert the decisions to meet the client’s accuracy levels of 99.95%
- Another area that needed attention was selecting the right kind of resources to ensure efficient execution of the project. For this, one day of intensive training was provided to a few selected candidates and after confirming their comfort and accuracy levels, a team was finalized
- As the project involved conversion of court rendered decisions which would be made live on web, it was necessary to ensure that the project was supervised by a lawyer experienced not just in legal terminology but also adept at understanding the intricacies of OCR and Word Formatting.
- The project had a very tight deadline and the accuracy levels of 99.95% had to be maintained compulsorily.
Solution:
To ensure that the project was delivered on time and with the expected quality levels, the project was distributed between three divisions –
- As the project involved court judgments, one of the lawyers from SunLexis with its experience of handling many similar projects in the past was appointed the Project Supervisor. The legal team was responsible for marking the printed judgments in accordance with client defined template. This marked judgment ensured that the scope of committing errors at the stage of applying the style and formatting was considerably reduced and that the time consumed in formatting the document was also reduced considerably.
- Simultaneous with the Marking Stage, the documents were OCRed by SunTec Digital (the Digital Content Conversion division of SunTec India). The tiff images were converted into text files using OCR Conversion process and then each document was proofread to maximize accuracy levels.
- After passing through the stages of marking and conversion, the documents were made ready by applying pre-defined tags on them. This task was performed by the Word Processing specialists of Data Entry India (the data entry division of SunTec India).
- The entire process was capped by Quality Check at each stage of execution.
- The final work product was delivered after receiving the final approval from the Project Supervisor, a qualified lawyer having executed similar tasks in the past.
Results:
The conversion of the historical decisions worked to the advantage of both the client and SunLexis.
- The client received documents that were easily editable and accessible to the viewers. The accuracy levels of the digitization process were so high that the client was able to make the decisions available on Internet without expending more efforts on the same. This has increased the number of visits to the client’s site and also generated higher revenues.
- The accuracy and the timely delivery of the project have earned SunLexis a long term relationship with this client. Ever since the first project which we received more than two years back, we have been digitizing the decisions on a regular basis.
