The Judicial Power (PJUD) is one of the three branches of the modern State of Chile that, together with the Legislative and the Executive branches, serves as the basis for the democratic development of the country. This government body is designed to solve conflicts, interpret law, guarantee people´s rights and ensure legal security and peace within the framework of a constitutional, social and democratic state. It’s made up of a system of courts and institutions of varying areas of expertise and hierarchial levels, working to grant people timely and quality justice.

Challenge

Chile, often listed among the countries with the best welfare in the world, is a democratic state with an elevated level of security and social protection. The role of fostering and maintaining the well-being of Chilean society is carried out by a set of governmental bodies, among them the Judicial Power.

The civil court is one of the judicial bodies that handle the highest number of cases; therefore, it deals with an intense document flow. Each legal case requires the handling of a multitude of paper documents that need to be stored once the case is closed.

Without an adequate software system that would allow users to work with data in an efficient way, the Judicial Power used to spend great amounts of time and workforce resources on dealing with the flow of information. All the civil claims received by PJUD were stored as non-searchable paper-based PDF documents. Confined to this format, the data did not allow for efficient and rapid work, since the archives were impossible to search for metadata or keywords, inaccessible, ineditable and unstructured.

Solution

In search of a solution that would allow to create digital documents, PJUD contacted Comercial SF — a multifunctional equipment and software distributor and a certified ABBYY Partner in Chile. The customer chose ABBYY due to the high recognition accuracy of its software, the high speed of conversion, and the brand’s reputation on the market. Together with Comerical SF, PJUD decided on the solution: the functionality of ABBYY Recognition Server was a great fit for the job.

Now PJUD’s problem of non-actionable and unclassified files is a thing of the past. Once the civil claims are either scanned or received in image format, the documents enter the processing stage of ABBYY Recognition Server, where the program applies highly accurate OCR with 99% reliability. The image-based PDFs are then converted into editable PDF files.

The recognition results are then reviewed by operators and provided with metadata for an easy and fast search. The workflow concludes with the publication of the documents in catalog format in the internal resources of the organization.

Result

The implementation of ABBYY Recognition Server has transformed the way in which the numerous civil lawsuits are processed and stored in Chile. At its maximum capacity, the intelligent solution helps to recognize around 35,000,000 documents annually, classifying them and storing them in the necessary order, thus improving the search speed and resulting in a higher work productivity of Chilean civil courts.

In addition to having the information from the PDF documents in text format and thus making the court process more efficient, the number of employees involved in the workflow has been dramatically reduced. Where previously the task required the manual work of approximately 8 staff members, only 2 people are needed to handle the entire process now.