Why Spectrum
Legal BPO Products and Services

Spectrum Business Support Ltd is the oldest entity in India to create and market computerised law information databases. 400+ man-years of law data compilation helped us create arguably India's largest collection of law information on magnetic media. We have delivered what is today eJurix, India’s Electronic Law Library, available on-line on the web and PDA and as a quarterly published CD-suite for an uninterrupted period of over 18 years, to several thousand law professionals in India, including eminent individual lawyers and law firms, individual chartered accountants & firms of accountants (including the India offices of all the Big Four), corporates including almost all major banks operating in India, benches of the major Tribunals (viz., the Company Law Board, the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal and the Customs Excise & Service Tax Act Tribunal), the Supreme Court of India and 6 High Courts, and the Securities & Exchange Board of India.

We have in the past been entrusted with the task of disseminating, on computer media, the pronouncements of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI). For more than 8 years, and counting, the RBI has authorized us to vend their circulars on computer-media through a formal agreement and this agreement is alive as at this date.

Our team members have worked together with International law firms, then called Baker & McKenzie, Jones Day Reavis & Pogue and Greenberg Traurig to help draft legislation that was later enacted as India’s Information Technology Act, 2000.

We undertake research support to select clients already and now offer the same to all our clients.

Due to the our experience in creating and marketing computerized Law Information, we have acquired considerable expertise in areas relating to Content (including Document/Records) Management. These involve Data Acquisition and Management methodologies and services to enable clients to design databases, scan and/or key in several million records, index them, and mine their contents. Also, we provide Retrieval systems built to address several million records, provide research & retrieval services to large numbers of users simultaneously, on hosted services as well as client-owned networks, and provide services for ongoing addition and updation to the original databases.

Clients include Publishers and large organizations in India viz., Business India magazine for whom we created their first CD-based searchable digital archive product and the Reserve Bank of India, for whom we’ve compiled a database containing 1.4+ million pages of content, implemented on an Intranet that is simultaneously accessed by as many as 24 simultaneous users. Similar applications across a wide area network in India are implemented for organizations like Indian Oil Corporation.

We work with Indian and US law firms in the Litigation Support and Electronic Data Discovery areas and would be happy to provide the same to a larger number of clients.

This whole set of offerings is part of the LegistixÔ suite. Law firms gain economic and strategic advantage through imaging. Advantages come through more powerful control over data and more efficient access to their documents. The sheer savings on storage, paper, photocopying and hardware maintenance, employee costs is large enough and offset by maintaining digital images. There are several economic advantages, including cost savings, storage savings, employee savings and review savings.

Legal BPO Products and Services

1. Legal Research
2. Litigation Support Coding
3. Electronic Data Discovery
4. Archival & Conversion Services (ACS)

Legal Research

Our Legal Researchers search through large in-house databases (where we are provided access) and third-party Law Information Databases viz., Grand JURIX, Lexis-Nexis Westlaw, etc.

Our researchers interact with client personnel to specify the research proposition. Obviously, without loss of client confidentiality, our researchers need to be put into context, to ensure more focused hits rather than generalized responses. Iterative interactions are provided to ensure the researcher supports the client lawyer through the length of the matter, including response generation for opposing counsel’s research-based submissions.

Spectrum’s 15 years’ experience with Legal Researchers, gives us the expertise and experience to offer these services at competitive rates, with quick turn-around. We have a well-defined and smooth process for accepting client requests, defining the re-search proposition, and conducting a response validation exercise, in an iterative and interactive mode.

Where needed, dedicated Research Officers (individually or in teams), stay with your team for continuing and interactive research & response requirements. Interactions are conducted on email and/or voice, as need be. Our Research Officers are trained in-house and a regular Skill Audit is conducted by our Independent Legal Advisors including former High Court Judges, Practicing Counsel and Company Secretaries.

Download pdf     Email: ejurix@sbsworld.com


Electronic Data Discovery (EDD)

EDD requires reviewing digital data buried in large and possibly distributed digital repositories, for production of files containing relevant data in compliance with a discovery request. Obviously, this presumes provision of all such material to Spectrum’s EDD Consultant, giving search guidelines and time schedules within which results are to be usefully provided to the Case Preparation team

As the EDD consultant, we would mine (locate, extract and catalogue) content in Email, email attachments, word processing documents, spreadsheets, several other formats, from various locations – hard disks, CDs, etc. EDD is a person- and situation-specific activity, to be normally conducted in short periods of time. Using our proprietory full-text search & retrieval engine, WordMiner, Spectrum provides customized tools or Services to meet client requirements.

Apart from providing customized services, Spectrum also provides through our product Legistix, a software tool-set that can be implemented at client locations to provide the Indexing & re-search flexibility required for successful EDD:

- Supports all type of formats - Images, Spreadsheets, MS Word docs, e-mails and even voice transcriptions
- Compatible with Outlook and Email Files that can be imported into Outlook.
- Supports multiple files with same names as attachment
- Allows tree like classification
- Text and images are linked and viewable through easy GUI
- Provides sophisticated retrieval – full text search and index combination

Download pdf     Email: ejurix@sbsworld.com

Litigation Support Coding (LSC)
LSC requires Coding of voluminous paper documents. Typically these form the preparatory material for any major lawsuit. Equally, coding could be immensely useful for creating in-house use knowledge bases. Coding requires legal expertise and understanding of the content of such documents. Where necessary, apart from our team of law professionals, we retain the services of domain experts.

For the last 15 years, we’ve been coding & meta-tagging for our Law Database product Grand JURIX, a combination of “normal” indexes (party-names, court name, dates, etc) and “derived” indexes (Act-section, phrase, topic, etc) based on content analysis.

For the Legal Department of a large Bank, we regularly index legal documents to their Legal department’s specifications since 1998. Apart from the “normal” indexes, we have created Subject indexes, Act and Section indexes and Hyper-links between documents, “derived from” or based on content analysis software as well as inputs from domain experts.

Recently, we completed a pilot for a US-based Law firm for indexing of litigation documents. We populated “normal” indexes in line with the client’s Manual. The indexing parameters included - range of page numbers, file index, type of document, author, organization, date, title/subject, and links between scanned image and indexes.

Archival & Conversion Services (ACS)
Spectrum’s ACS team provides services to scan large volumes of paper into image databases, and convert image data into text where desired, as well as convert from one digital format to another digital format viz., PDF/JPEG to MS Word Documents. This creates a repository that is easier to manage, than the source documents it was created from. “Manage” here means - search & retrieve, organize, copy and forward, print, etc.

Spectrum has created large law information databases for the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, ICICI Bank Ltd, Matrix Information Services, and others. For the Legal Dept of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) we scanned 0.95 million pages, across 240,000 documents, OCRed & attached their abstracts, meta-tagged them and created a software interface for ongoing archival & sophisticated full-text search.

Today, we can process 0.25 million paper documents each month. With due notice, this capability can be upscaled, as per client needs.

In order to go beyond paper and thus provide a full-service approach, we are setting up a Transcription services group to provide a range of services including - Audio Transcription (or dictation) services for data from mini, micro, standard and mini disc tapes, plus digital DSS and WAV sound files, Video Captioning, Manuscript proofreading, Transcript Summarization, etc.

Download pdf     Email: ejurix@sbsworld.com