ABBYY’s Vice President of Sales Joe Budelli Elected AIIM North American Chairman "Joe’s involvement as the North American chairman and member of the International Board of Directors ... more >> |
Private Equity company selects MasterFile Evidence Cruncher-Powered by ABBYY FineReader™ Engine
|
- Keith Pettle, Principal, Icarus Enterprises, LLC. |
Evidence Cruncher Simplifies Process of Producing Extracts from Scanned Documents.
Icarus Enterprises, LLC, is a Dallas-based private equity firm that provides its clients vehicles for investing funds in various areas, including commodities trading, art investments, and motion picture productions. Given the financial and investment nature of the business, litigation is inevitable, particularly in the motion picture financing category, where contract disputes frequently escalate to criminal prosecution. Oftentimes such activities occur across international borders, thereby increasing the complexity of such cases for Icarus.
In addition, because the elements required for proof of criminal culpability differs among jurisdictions, the same cases must be approached differently when presenting the issue to authorities in differing jurisdictions. What starts as a single case often develops into two or more cases depending on the number of jurisdictions involved. Therefore, a case with the same facts and physical evidence needs to be applied differently to prove specific charges in an effort to serve the requirements of the jurisdictions involved.
An example of this is an Icarus case involving stolen funds, forged documents, and other like illegal activities that cross four international jurisdictions, including the United States and Europe. Each jurisdiction was concerned with a different aspect of the case: fraud against a national company and misuse of the corporation in one jurisdiction; forgery and bank theft in a second; the use of telecommunications to commit fraud in a third, and bank fraud in the fourth. The complaints involving this case had to be prepared concurrently in four different ways to meet the needs of the individual jurisdictions.
Icarus Finds the Right Solution in MasterFile, Powered by ABBYY
Realizing he needed a solution to better manage the complex details of these cases, Keith Pettle, Principal at Icarus, began searching online and came across MasterFile, among other solutions. He felt that MasterFile’s unique software solution, with its Evidence Cruncher module, powered by ABBYY FineReader Engine, provided his company with exactly what it needed: advanced case analysis, fact management and argument drafting, a PDF/evidence repository, and document management, all in one.
MasterFile’s ability to replicate and synchronize the case database (including documents, PDFs, case analyses, research, issues, facts, arguments, commentary, etc.) to laptops and USB memory sticks, proved essential to Icarus.
“While replication of parts of the information is theoretically possible by using a mixture of other programs, none have had the convenience, ease and speed of MasterFile, nor have it all in one place,” said Mr. Pettle. “I’m very glad I (found MasterFile). It has saved me a great deal of time and money, and made possible an otherwise impossible situation,” he said.
Icarus uses MasterFile to manage both scanned and electronic documents. MasterFile’s integrated Evidence Cruncher module, powered by ABBYY FineReader Engine, has greatly simplified the process of producing critical extracts from the documents. “Without MasterFile’s integrated Evidence Cruncher to create OCR documents we would not be able to prepare the documents we need for the various jurisdictions with which we are dealing. The time factor involved in scanning and then separately converting to OCR documents is simply prohibitive. The accuracy of the [ABBYY] OCR technology embodied in the Evidence Cruncher is astounding,” said Mr. Pettle.
With MasterFile’s solution, Icarus had the option of tying the documents to its specific issues, topics and facts, at either a later time or during the document review phase once documents were loaded. Icarus chose to do the latter, which proved highly advantageous. “The thought process of deciding how the documents I was profiling related to other profiles and to the issues, topics and facts, helped establish the logical basis for presenting a case,” said Mr. Pettle. “MasterFile’s ability to modify issues, topics, facts, players and the profiles and extracts themselves, either individually or globally throughout the entire database, is an extremely important feature which saves an incredible amount of time,” he said.
Company: Icarus Enterprises, LLC
Industry: Private equity investments
Location: Dallas, Texas
Products: MasterFile with Evidence Cruncher module, powered by ABBYY FineReader ® Engine
Result: Convenience, speed, and ease of use in managing complex, multi-national litigation