Developing a Legal Matter Platform with OCR capabilities at a Law Firm

Legal firms need to exchange a lot of information with clients in the form of paper work. This can include everything from paper evidence and certificates to contracts and formal communications. In addition to that, they have to also manage documents from third parties such as courts, tax departments, experts, witnesses, and more. In order to serve their clients efficiently and keep them well-informed about the progress of their case, documents need to be a useful tool and not a cumbersome obstacle.

The client contacted Anchormen to build a tool that can help them manage all of this information as well as create insight into the progress and status of different proceedings. Preparation for important events and hearings depends largely on the timely management of documents and there were a lot of other minor tasks that were obstructing more important work.

The project initially culminated into a fully functional web-app that is able to track proceedings timelines and activities within different jurisdictions. The proceedings are fed into an Overview Dashboard which enables the law firm to communicate milestones and next steps. This solution was then expanded and developed into a platform which allows for the structuring of internal workflows and communicating progress to clients of the law firm.

The legal matter platform was built using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services on a virtual private cloud for security and compliance. The core functionality of the platform is implemented in a set of micro-services, which make use of additional cloud services available at AWS or at the client’s premise for storing data, sending emails and long-term storage of files. The platform has several components and functionalities, such as a frontend container running a standard Nginx application, an OCR-service that extracts information from files, a CloudProdDB (AWS Aurora) database for all relational and binary data storage, and more.

The solution we built provides the client with a way to streamline information processing, allowing lawyers to focus on delivering results to their clients. Files can be made more dynamic and usable, ensuring accessibility, optimization, and search functionality as well as ease of storage. All kinds of documents can be processed faster and more efficiently which improves the quality of work and allows the law firm to communicate progress better with their clients. All of this is achieved in a compliant and secure way both for the law firm and their clients.