Ayfie is an information management and retrieval platform used by lawyers for reviewing document collections and for running general knowledge management searches
Common use cases for Ayfie in legal include:
- litigation
- due diligence
- forensics
- insolvencies
These cases tend to be time sensitive so the time saved in sorting, mining, tagging and reviewing docs has enormous value to our users and clients.
![icons8-connect-150-1](https://www.ayfie.com/hubfs/icons8-connect-150-1.png)
Connect Your Data
Combine information that resides in various applications and communication channels into a single structured interface. Get a holistic view of all client data, firm data, email communications, archives, file servers and CRMs. Aggregate information into a single search interface is the first step to improve data access.
![icons8-search-150-2](https://www.ayfie.com/hubfs/icons8-search-150-2.png)
Search Your Data
Enhances meta data by automatically extracting key entities from documents such as Organizations, Persons and Locations. Image files, such as PDFs, are automatically OCR’d and thus the contents of thousands of PDFs are searchable at the same time. You no longer need to open docs or PDFs “one-by-one”. Now you can run queries across a collection of PDFs. Extract text from photographs, vector-based drawings and CAD files.
![icons8-manage-150](https://www.ayfie.com/hs-fs/hubfs/icons8-manage-150.png?width=150&height=150&name=icons8-manage-150.png)
Manage Your Data
Use the preview functionality to review and search within documents, and then place notes on the docs, annotate docs and create chronological timelines with documents. All of the work products from the review team can be exported to Excel and Word for continued use within the firm. This removes the tedious task of “copy/paste” from Word to Excel.
How is Ayfie used by law firms?
Early Data Assessment (EDA) of document collections
Ayfie structures “data dumps” from clients and combines data sent by different channels, e.g. Email, File Shares, Slack, Teams. Scanned documents and image files are OCR’d and converted to text for searching. Documents are sorted by file type, language, metadata and named entity extraction is run against document contents. Document collections can be searched and reviewed, including the ability to place notes on documents and create chronological times.
General Knowledge Search
Ayfie connects data held in various software applications and communication channels. The most common configuration of Ayfie for Legal includes indexing MS Office, SharePoint, Teams as well as iManage, HighQ, File Servers and archive systems.
![locator-deals](https://www.ayfie.com/hubfs/locator-deals.jpg)
What benefits does Ayfie provide lawyers?
- Searching Email Attachments – A lot of information is held in Emails and Attachments. SharePoint doesn’t OCR documents and thus any image files or scanned documents are not searchable. Ayfie allows all emails and attachments to be fully searchable, including images.
- Finding information, irrespective of file type or location – Imagine a due diligence exercise where supplier contracts need to be reviewed. Contracts could be PDFs, scanned documents, Excel templates, or DocuSign agreements that could be held in different repositories and in different languages. Ayfie allows all contracts to be searchable.
- Light Document Review – Smaller document volumes don’t justify expensive eDiscovery platforms, and thus lawyers prefer Ayfie’s ability to index a collection and conduct document review while previewing documents online. Reviewers can annotate text, tag files, place notes on docs and create timelines within the UI. All of their work can be reviewed by colleagues online and it’s exportable to Word or Excel.
- Time – Litigation and corporate teams want to surf through document collections like they do through the internet and Ayfie allows them to find information faster, no matter where it resides.
![Ayfie Lawyer](https://www.ayfie.com/hubfs/businessman%20hand%20working%20with%20modern%20technology%20and%20digital%20layer%20effect%20as%20business%20strategy%20concept.jpeg)
Access Rights and Identity Management
With Ayfie, you don’t have to move any files and all security and access rights are set using existing security, such as Active Directory. Ayfie does not duplicate documents. It allows information to remain in various software applications across the firm.
The Ayfie solution creates a text-only digital twin of every file and an index is created that contains all of the text, metadata and Active Directory rights for every repository and every file. This ensures employees only access information that they are allowed to access within a source system.
You control your access rights and Ayfie emulates them using our Active Directory connector. Since your repositories are crawled every 10 minutes, all documents added or deleted and any access rights granted or denied are reflected within Ayfie.
![LegalTech_Hammer](https://www.ayfie.com/hubfs/AdobeStock_216540289_LegalTech_Hammer_phonlamaiphoto-1.jpeg)
Kvale & Ayfie Collaboration
Over the last five years, Ayfie has been working with a number of Norwegian law firms and their corporate and litigation practices. One of these firms is Kvale who employ 85 lawyers. Kvale was looking for a tool for their litigation practice to use as a pre-eDiscovery tool to review and reduce document collections before placing them into expensive eDiscovery platforms.
Kvale’s litigation team sought intuitive tools that didn’t require training and were interactive and iterative. Their experience was that a lot of legal tech requires training and the development of new processes. Kvale was looking for an early case assessment tool that could be used by paralegals, associates and partners which would expedite and enhance their ability for teams to conduct document review, using existing keyword search techniques.
The firm selected Ayfie as a holistic tool to handle unstructured data that is growing in both size and complexity.
“The question is how to deal with unstructured data. Data that we need to examine, which is to be handled in an extensive transaction or data to be investigated in the event of a GDPR violation. You need a holistic tool to handle the information and get an overview, and with Ayfie we get that.”
Per-Kaare Svendsen
Partner, Kvale
Local Events & Legal Tech
We had the pleasure of attending the Nordic Legal Tech Day in Oslo on September 13. As a local sponsor and great insight to present with the legal industry we shared the stage with Kvale to show and tell why today's AI solutions are worth testing.