Case Study
Ensuring Historical Legal Precedents are Preserved for Future Generations
Situation
The United States Office of the Solicitor General and Office of Legal Counsel faced a critical task. They held declassified legal opinions furnished to 14 of the past Presidents of the United States. Their proper maintenance is critical given both the ethical and patriotic obligation to protect our history, along with the legal obligation to preserve and codify legal precedent, with proper verification of legal guidance given and actions taken. The risk of losing these documents further to the ravages of history was real, and time was running out.
Solutions Applied:
AutoClassification
Document Analytics
Electronic File Processing
OCR & Text Extraction
Analytics & Data Mining
Challenge
60,000 historic legal opinions urgently needed to be brought into compliance for storage, retention, tagging, and posterity. More so, the work would need to be done by hand because some documents dated back to the 1930s, with the majority from 1950-1970, and had not been gently stored.
Solution
The client turned to Valora Technologies, Inc. for this important historical work. Valora, with its long history performing automated document analysis and processing services for large-scale and complex document populations, provided a custom implementation of its PowerHouse AutoClassification engine and a team of 25 security-cleared personnel to perform the work. As with many Valora client engagements, automation was the key to this project.
Results
The documents needed a lot of work to reach compliance. PDF files were unitized and mapped, including re-ordering pages. ASCII text content was fixed and remediated. Accurate and appropriate metadata was generated for each document, including Freedom of Information Act notes that had accumulated over the years.
In a two-part process that involved both data remediation and metadata coding, Valora enriched these historical documents with a 100% accuracy rating for all files, as measured by the client, the US government. The legal opinions were saved and Valora ensured that the process was as painless as possible for an already overwhelmed agency.