WIREDGOV

The Serious Fraud Office has announced a significant upgrade to its document analysis capability as artificial intelligence is made available to all of its new casework from April 2018

By automating document analysis, AI technology allows the SFO to investigate more quickly, reduce costs and achieve a lower error rate than through the work of human lawyers, alone.

Able to process more than half a million documents a day, a pilot “robot” was recently used to scan for legal professional privilege content in the SFO’s Rolls-Royce case at speeds 2,000 times faster than a human lawyer. Building on this success, ‘Axcelerate’ a new AI powered document review system from OpenText, is now being rolled out alongside the robot, and will enable SFO case teams to better target their work & time in other aspects of investigative and prosecutorial work.

Not only will the new AI document review system be able to recognise patterns, group information by subject, organise timelines, and remove duplicates, it will eventually be able to sift for relevancy thereby removing documents unrelated to an investigation.