Litigation Department

Task

Each month, a Fortune 100 company receives 20,000 litigation-based documents. Legally, the documents can be delivered to any of hundreds of addresses where the company does business. But for control purposes, they are all forwarded to a centralized location, where they’re scanned and entered into a firmwide database. Capturing and responding to every document on a timely basis is critical to the financial and regulatory well-being of the company.

Physical Mail Process

Legal documents arrive at a vast range of company locations. But asking employees at each receiving address to determine the rightful recipient would result in chaos, with documents being redelivered multiple times until they found their correct destination. To prevent this, the company has every legal document forwarded to a single centralized litigation office. There, it’s scanned and entered into a workflow system by subject matter experts, so that each piece can be correctly delegated, tracked and monitored.

This process creates myriad efficiency problems. For instance, when a legal document arrives at a retail location, it gets sorted into a system that re-sends all retail mail to a regional location, regardless of content. Sometimes this mail is addressed to a person, though often not the correct person. It is delivered to them nonetheless. This recipient must then recognize the mail is a legal document and reroute it to the litigation department. All told, this one example can take 3-10 business days or more. Once in the litigation department, it’s scanned by non-specialized workers, at high cost, on low-speed multifunction devices. Finally in digitized form, someone looks through each document and enters the content and metadata into a litigation tracking system. Scanning all 20,000 of these lengthy documents takes more than 30 full-time equivalents
per month, performing tedious, error-prone tasks.

Eco-Mail’s Digitized Mail Process

In Eco-Mail’s digital mail environment, all mail, including legal documents, is sent to one of just a few dedicated mail processing centers. Every document is scanned at the point of receipt using high-speed scanners operated by relatively low-cost employees, and automatically routed by Eco-mail’s sophisticated rules engine. Obvious legal documents will be routed directly to the litigation department and delivered in seconds, not days. When legal mail is addressed to a specific employee, forwarding it to the litigation department takes just two clicks and a few seconds. Eco-Mail reduces a 3-10 day process to just a few minutes, and reduces inefficient, expensive downstream processing by approximately 95%. It also creates an automated audit trail to track every action on every document – especially useful in legal matters.

In cases where a litigation department may want to add a legally-oriented machine-learning solution to their queued mail, Eco-mail integrates with such systems seamlessly – further saving massive amounts of labor and time.

Summary

In this use case, centralized high-speed scanning of inbound mail dramatically reduces the effort it takes for critical time sensitive documents to reach their required destination. And the automated tracking of digitized documents proves especially useful for a litigation department. In cases like this, where adding machine learning may be beneficial down the road, Eco-mail integrates seamlessly with such systems.