Legal Service Bureaus: A True Niche For Imaging

For IKON Digital Litigation Services (DLS), located just outside of Washington D.C., implementing imaging was a reaction to market demand and a means to stay competitive. IKON DLS, a subsidiary of the billion-dollar company, IKON Office Solutions, is a service bureau for the legal profession. IKON DLS was formerly known as Document Services and simply provided photocopying services to clients. At that time, legal professionals would use the company to make copies of their critical documents. Because customers demanded it, IKON DLS implemented imaging four years ago. Law firms and corporate legal departments use IKON DLS for creating document image files, full-text files and coded databases.

Thousands Of Documents Sorted Manually
For lawyers to be prepared for a trial, they need to search through legal documents quickly and efficiently. Often, copies of legal documents must be made for other law firms. When one law firm subpoenas another law firm's materials pertaining to a certain case, it often receives hundreds of thousands of documents that must be sorted manually. This is usually done by scores of paralegals. Each document must be properly researched, tagged and numbered to be used in the courtroom. Paralegals spend weeks sorting through hard copy printouts, reading and categorizing them. With the high volume of paper involved, moving documents from location to location is also difficult.

Give Clients The Technology They Want
Several of IKON DLS's clients inquired about having documents placed electronically onto CDs for easier transport and research. Although IKON DLS was doing well financially and had no complaints about its copying service, it looked for ways to answer the demand of its customers. IKON DLS contacted Kodak, who referred them to Radian Systems (Alexandria, VA), a Kodak reseller and imaging software developer. A company of approximately 45 employees, with 1997 gross sales of more than $8 million, Radian provided IKON DLS with the solution its law clients were asking for. Radian implemented an electronic document system that provided high-speed image scanning, image clean-up, optical character recognition (OCR), and indexing.

Efficient High-Volume Document Scanning
A Kodak Imagelink 923 D high-speed scanner, which can handle daily volumes of 12,000 to 30,000 pages was installed. In any given month, IKON DLS can scan more than three million pages. The Kodak 923 D works in conjunction with a scanner software application from Radian called WorldScan. WorldScan provides complete control over all scanner functions. Employees scan documents in batches and the scanned images are then fed through multiple PCs. This "pipeline" of PCs runs a Radian software product called WorldScan Distributed Object Manager (WSDOM). As document images are moved into the pipeline, they are automatically enhanced (image clean-up, deskewing, despeckling, etc.). The images then run through a quality assurance (Q/A) check, where employees do page-by-page checking for image clarity at large-screen terminals. After Q/A, employees index the documents and export them onto a medium (CD, disk, optical, etc.) that matches the client's target retrieval system. The system application uses a Hewlett Packard server with 10 gigabytes of storage to temporarily store document images during the ongoing process.

Employees Learn System Quickly
The sales cycle for the IKON DLS installation was about three months, according to Ken Tighe, president of Radian Systems. The only competition Radian faced for the job was from another integrator offering a similar system using Cornerstone's InputExcel. Tighe says the decision-makers at IKON DLS chose the Radian package because it did not require programmer script files to be written for jobs with special configurations. What this means, Tighe says, is with the Radian software, no additional coding or programming needs to be written for different jobs. The WSDOM software can be configured using a point-and-click method. Integrators from Radian Systems trained the supervisors at IKON DLS for approximately a week on each step of the process (scanning, Q/A, indexing and exporting). IKON DLS employees then learned the system from their supervisors in the same amount of time.

Two Other Locations Adopt Imaging
"This imaging system has provided IKON with revenue the company would have lost to more forward- thinking competitors," says Tighe. "In the past it was very cumbersome and expensive for IKON customers to use armies of paralegals to sort and categorize pallets of documents. Now they can do it faster and more easily at their desktop."

Since the installation at the Washington D.C. IKON DLS location, two more IKON DLS branches – New York and Atlanta – have implemented the technology. The only difference at the two additional locations is that new Kodak Digital Science 9500 D scanners with faster scanning capabilities were implemented. The Washington facility has also installed a Kodak Digital Science 3500 D to work in conjunction with the 923 D. "IKON is now expanding this system to other areas of the country and other facilities which primarily are doing photocopying services," says Tighe.