MinterEllison, the international law firm headquartered in Australia, is successfully using iManage RAVN to streamline an enormous document review project for one of its clients. The project – which involves a financial services institution undergoing remediation – requires MinterEllison to review more than half a million documents over a six-month period to identify which items need further follow-up by the client.

“The data we received from the client was largely unstructured and uncategorized,” said Matthew Franks, AI and Emerging Technologies Lead at MinterEllison.

“From a review perspective, that meant our reviewers would have to look at every single document in that set of half a million files.”

iManage RAVN provided a smarter way forward for the firm. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine powers products like iManage Insight and iManage RAVN Extract, which can automatically understand, organize, and extract key data points from within documents.

“As the client sends over batches of documents, we can use RAVN to automatically classify them as a particular type of document,” said Franks. “That lets us immediately identify the documents that are relevant to our review, and filter out the irrelevant ones.”

After documents are classified, they are passed along to a specific review form that extracts the key bits of information for that particular document type. When MinterEllison’s reviewers log into the firm’s review platform, the most relevant documents have already been surfaced and presented to them for review, with all key pieces of data present.

Using iManage RAVN to assist with the review process allows MinterEllison to approach the task in a much more efficient – and cost effective – manner.

“If we were doing this review process entirely manually, we would need significantly more full-time employees (FTE) working on it,” said Gary Adler, Chief Digital Officer at MinterEllison.

“RAVN will reduce the number of FTEs we’ll need to use on this project, which we estimate will create close to $A2,000 in savings per day for our client across a six-month period. This efficiency aligns with our digital transformation strategy of providing better value to clients while empowering our lawyers to focus on higher-value activities, rather than laborious tasks that are better handled by AI.”

The MinterEllison legal operations team focused on process, people, and technology to help create an end-to-end, automated solution that it could use for document review projects.

Local iManage partner Phoenix Business Systems assisted with the RAVN implementation.

“The market notices innovation, and rewards it accordingly,” said Nick Thomson, General Manager, iManage RAVN.  “Taking advantage of RAVN has allowed MinterEllison to offer their client a solution their competitors couldn’t. This does more than serve as a powerful marketplace differentiator – it allows MinterEllison to be a true partner to its clients, delivering innovative solutions and exceptional outcomes.”