Automated document review

Case study: Innovating for more efficient document review

Challenge

Reviewing documents is a common, required activity in delivering client services across businesses at Deloitte. For example, in the context of an audit, human eyes can spend thousands of hours poring over contracts, meeting minutes, and invoices. The manual effort can be tedious and time consuming. A contract document can take multiple hours to review.

Innovation

To accelerate this process, Deloitte developed an automated document review platform. The software tool:

• Uses cognitive technologies—capabilities that allow computers to imitate human reasoning. For instance, the automated document review platform uses natural language processing to read and recognize patterns in documents. It applies advanced machine learning techniques to automatically identify relevant information and key terms in the documents—improving its accuracy over time as practitioners review a wider set of documents.
• Designed to fit into practitioners’ existing workflows and can improve effectiveness.
• Allows users to review documents and extract information in new ways. With the application, professionals can evaluate an entire population of contracts to identify documents where key information was not included or identify how a document and its subsequent revisions have been modified over time.

Impact

The Automated Document Review platform holds benefits for all of Deloitte’s businesses and the clients they serve. The software tool allows teams to process all types of documents and unstructured information faster and with greater accuracy.

One team was able to increase the scope of their contract review effort by multiple orders of magnitude—processing more than 150,000 documents—using the application.

Along with the capability to read and assess larger samples, the automated document review platform also includes real-time analytics. For instance, the software tool can find and separate documents that contain price escalation clauses from those that don’t, highlighting potential risks and differences in how to account for a particular transaction as an example.

Across Deloitte’s businesses, the automated document review platform can:

• Improve client service quality
• Help bring valuable insights to clients faster and more efficiently
• Enable professionals to spend more time on other important areas