Canon's artificial intelligence (AI) software provides assistance to law office personnel dealing with the growing volume of electronic and paper documents

Melville, N.Y. – To help law firms elevate client experience and maximize productivity, Canon Solutions America, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., today announced the introduction of Smart Document Assistant. This automated solution is designed to provide legal practices a technology assistant to automate the intake of information and match it with other documents in a legal document management system.

In a traditional law office, legal document management has involved cumbersome mountains of paper, case files and supporting records. While some law firms have undertaken measures to go digital, many continue to rely on massive amounts of paper to get their work done. Utilizing machine learning technology and artificial intelligence software, Smart Document Assistant can recognize the type of document, matter number, client names and other key data points in order to associate these data with other related documents. The more documents fed through the system, the "smarter" the system becomes, and less manual intervention is required going forward.

Smart Document Assistant uses the power of artificial intelligence to accelerate the process of getting incoming legal documents to where they belong in your iManage document management system. The software can identify an incoming document's type, associate it with a specific legal matter, name it, save it to the document management system, and notify the relevant attorneys, paralegals, and others of its arrival. The result is greater accuracy and compliance with your document handling procedures, and faster document access for your legal staff.

Designed for increased accuracy and enhanced service, a user's acceptance and correction actions form a "machine learning" feedback loop, where accuracy improves over time. Smart Document Assistant can send notification emails of the document's arrival to an editable machine-learned list of relevant lawyers, records room, and other staff for that legal matter. Built with optimal business outcomes in mind, this technology is also pre-trained to recognize a variety of litigation and court document types and can be trained to recognize company-specific document types.

"When it comes to managing legal documents, the power of artificial intelligence can help take a firm's organizational excellence from good to great, and Smart Document Assistant can be that differentiating factor," said Peter P. Kowalczuk, president, Canon Solutions America. "By reducing the time needed to manually add metadata to new and existing documents, firms can better maximize efficiencies as well as ensure greater accuracy when handling large and/or complex matters. This solution was also strategically introduced during a time when law firms may have been forced to reduce their reliance on paper, accelerating the need for alternative, more cohesive ways of remaining organized and maintaining strong client communication through automated systems."

To learn more about Smart Document Assistant, please visit csa.canon.com.