Case Study

How a Top Singapore Law Firm Reduced Document Disclosure Preparation Time by 90% with BriefTech

A disputes team at a top Singapore law firm faced a tight 2-week deadline to prepare a List-of-Documents (LOD) Index for nearly 5,000 files. Rather than overloading associates with overtime to manually produce the index over the festive holidays, they turned to BriefTech’s AI solution to automate document processing, OCR, data extraction, and index production—helping the team meet the deadline without compromising their mental well-being.

KEY OUTCOMES

10x Improvement in Turnaround Time

The time taken to manually produce the LOD index for 5,000 documents for disclosure would have typically taken 20 man-days. With BriefTech, all it took was 2 man-days to produce the same work product.

50% Savings on Manpower Cost

A junior associate working tirelessly for an entire month to produce the same index would have cost upward of S$5,000. With BriefTech, it cost the team less than S$2,500 to reliably produce the same work product for disclosure.

Priceless Improvement in Mental Well-Being

The junior associates nearly had to work late nights / weekends during the festive season to manually churn out the index. With BriefTech, the team managed to avoid this soul-crushing manual grunt work and preserve their sanity and work-life balance.

How BriefTech Helped

CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS

When preparing the list of documents for disclosure in a construction-related dispute, legal teams often face a series of significant challenges, especially when the process is done manually by legal secretaries, paralegals, or junior associates. For this case study, the team encountered the following specific challenges:

CHALLENGE 1

Short Notice & Tight Deadline

CHALLENGE: The team was tasked on short notice to process nearly 5,000 documents and produce the documents index with descriptions within a tight two-week deadline.

SOLUTION: BriefTech’s AI automation processed thousands of documents and populated the date/time/descriptions of the documents index within a day. The rest of the time were minimally spent on refinements and amendments due to changes on client side.

CHALLENGE 2

Lack of Manpower During Festive Holiday Period

CHALLENGE: This request came in during the festive holiday season, when many staff members were on leave or preparing for vacations, leaving the team short-handed to meet the deadline.

SOLUTION: BriefTech’s AI automation ran overnight, unattended. With one administrator uploading, deleting, and amending documents, BriefTech handled the rest of the workflow automatically for the administrator to review the output.

CHALLENGE 3

Inconsistent File Types Requires Additional Processing Work

CHALLENGE: Most of the client’s documents were in image formats or scanned PDFs without OCR, requiring manual OCR later to make them review-friendly.

SOLUTION: BriefTech automatically checks if documents are text-searchable and generates OCR-processed PDFs when needed, ensuring efficient indexing for future review in the eDiscovery workflow.

CHALLENGE 4

Description Formatting Had To Be Changed Midway

CHALLENGE: After most descriptions were generated, there was a request to change the formatting; that could have been disastrous if the team had to manually amend all the descriptions.

SOLUTION: BriefTech’s AI refiner enables a simple manual edit to a few descriptions, automatically updating the rest to match the new format reliably.

CHALLENGE 5

Single Source of Truth for Version Control and Updates

CHALLENGE: The team would have struggled to keep the document index up to date with constant file changes from the client, risking outdated files or missing updates when using local storage or shared drives.

SOLUTION: BriefTech centralizes document processing on a secure, cloud-based platform, automatically tracking file changes and keeping the document index current as files changed, ensuring only the latest, relevant documents are included and exported at the final stage.

KEY STATS

Total documents processed: >4,800
Total documents OCRed: >4,000
.pdf files disclosed: >4,100
.msg files disclosed: >380
.jpg files disclosed: >140
.xlsx files disclosed: >40
.dwg files disclosed: >20
.docx files disclosed: >15

THE IMPACT

The team was glad that BriefTech's AI-automation solution reliably relieved them from the soul-crushing data extraction and manual entry workflow, while achieving a 10x improvement in turnaround time. This shift also helped their clients reduce the fees needed to fully prepare for such compulsory disclosure tasks.

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