[MindPhair 2023] Talk – D-ONE

– Dr. Philipp Thomann 

Philipp received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Zurich in 2013. Afterwards he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the     University of Stuttgart, Germany. His areas of expertise are machine learning and data engineering.

For the compliance and legal profession, the exponential growth of data is both a threat and a promise. A threat, because finding crucial facts buried in hundreds of thousands of documents is hard. A promise, because proper management, analysis, and interpretation of data provides a competitive advantage and full transparency during all stages of investigations. Handling and harnessing that data in this high stakes industry is highly valuable.

At D ONE we strive to create value out of data. So when we were given the chance to work with legal data we developed a novel product gaining so much momentum it has become its own startup called Herlock.ai.

In this talk we present how this text analytics platform uses diverse NLP methods to find mentions of persons, dates, and locations in the corpus and makes these findings available to the user. In order to achieve this, several hurdles have to be overcome. Paper documents need to become machine readable. Even when the digital version exactly replicates the paper, the data is not available for analysis because of human inconsistencies and errors. Herlock.ai fixes these problems and provides excellent content. In order to support the user in their work, Herlock.ai needs to be easy to use and understand, e.g. by splitting documents into meaningful parts, by comparing different variants, and by marking textual anomalies.

You will learn how the platform has been used in a recent Swiss legal case that has received high media coverage. 500 federal folders that physically fill entire walls of shelves were an unprecedented challenge for the involved parties. Curious? We look forward to seeing you there.