Deloitte LLP is the UK member firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Deloitte provides audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte has in the region of 200,000 professionals, all committed to becoming the standard of excellence.

Challenge

Deloitte has one of the largest Forensic practices in the world with over 1400 dedicated practitioners in over 30 countries. Their services are increasingly sought by companies and lawyers who require detailed investigations to be undertaken or disputes to be resolved. The Forensic group includes forensic accountants, legal and law enforcement specialists, and business intelligence experts. Their teams use state-of-the-art forensic technology to ensure that data is handled with maximum efficiency.

Due to the nature of eDiscovery work, forensic analysts must work with many kinds of documents and file types. Their job is to comb through this data and select the appropriate documents in order to respond to litigation and compliance demands, for example. Doing so manually is both time-consuming and prone to human error and therefore electronic systems, such as eDiscovery software, are employed to simplify this important task.

Very often, the documents that Deloitte’s Forensics group deals with are image-only files, such as scanned PDFs, jPGs, tiFFs and GiFs. Although humans are able to read the content of these documents on a screen, computers are incapable of reading the content, as it is “trapped” in an unsearchable, non-editable format. To make full use of an eDiscovery’s capabilities documents must first be converted into a searchable format by using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. In order to handle large volumes of files and to automate the oct process the Forensics group decided to deploy ABBYY recognition Server.

Solution

ABBYY recognition Server, recently awarded Document Manager Magazine’s Product of the Year, is a centrally managed OCR service that helps large organisations automate their document capture and archiving processes. The easy-to-use server-based solution makes setup and operation in unattended mode simple, with no need for training. It can also connect with a variety of back-end systems and third-party applications, integrating via a web-service Api or a coM-based APi. The functionality can also be extended with Scripts and XML tickets.

After comparing multiple products, Deloitte chose recognition Server because of its conversion speed and scalability. Multi-language recognition was another consideration and the solution more than met this criteria with its 190, including major european, Asian and cyrillic-character languages. Through put was a final consideration, as the team experiences spikes in volume of up to 1000 documents per hour.

“To extend the capabilities of our eDiscovery suite we needed a scalable OCR solution that could quickly handle a large volume of files.”

Gearoid O’Laoithe, Forensic Technology Senior Manager

Results

With the new seamless solution, documents in the eDiscovery suite that are not searchable are identified and then exported to a watched folder. According to user-defined rules, ABBYY recognition Server grabs each job, performs OCR on the image files and then creates a fully searchable text file. That file is sent back to the suite so that it can be searched for relevant words or text passages. The solution vastly improves the process for Deloitte, reducing the manual work and the amount needed to search through content to a minimum.

About ABBYY UK Ltd.

ABBYY UK is a member of the ABBYY Group and supports sales and marketing activities in Western Europe.  ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. ABBYY offers Professional Services to help customers implementing business solutions based on ABBYY’s products. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY solutions to automate time- and labour-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects such as those of Australian Taxation Office, Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Education of Russia, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, and Montgomery County Government of the USA. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, KnowledgeLake, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world’s top manufacturers such as Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, Plustek, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the UK, the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Cyprus, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. More information at www.ABBYY.com