AI powered ‘Robo-Lawyer’ helps step up the SFO’s fight against economic crime

Today, the Serious Fraud Office announced a significant upgrade to its document analysis capability as artificial intelligence is made available to all of its new casework from this month.

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 and time in other aspects of investigative and prosecutorial work.

Previously, only independent barristers were used to comb through thousands of complex documents to identify evidence that could or couldn’t be seen by SFO investigators prior to them even beginning to sift through the documents themselves.

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.

SFO’s Chief Technology Officer, Ben Denison said: “AI technology will help us to work smarter, faster and more effectively investigate and prosecute economic crime.

“Using innovative technology like this is no longer optional – it is essential given the volume of material we are dealing with and will help ensure we can continue to meet our disclosure obligations and deliver justice sooner, at significantly lower cost.

“The amount of data handled by our digital forensics team has quadrupled in the last year and that trend is continuing upwards as company data grows ever larger.”