Whether a box of records is acquired, or a record originates within a company, the requirement to retain the records for any extended period lends itself to degradation in the context and content. Boxes pile up over time and at some point, someone needs information from those boxes. The average cost per box in off-site storage is $9.00 per year when taking into consideration the activities related to records requests, i.e., storage, retrieval, re-shelving, and transportation fees, often referred to as hidden fees, spread over the entire population of records for a company in off-site storage. This does not include costs related to on-site triage and review, digital conversion, legal holds, records attestation for destruction approval, or a myriad of project driven activities.
How is this addressed today? There are two approaches, either manually review the physical records in each box OR scan every document in the boxes.
Physical review involves knowledge workers, who have a general idea of what range of boxes contain the information needed to fulfill a records request and Subject Matter Experts (SME), i.e. attorneys, paralegals, accountants, engineers, geologists, etc. The range of boxes can be expansive and may require the review of thousands of boxes by SMEs to locate the small percentage of specific boxes that contain the records being sought. The significant cost for these activities includes travel, lodging, expenses, and time.
The second option is to scan everything, which time consuming and very expensive (anywhere from $250.00 a box up to $1,200.00 per box dependent on the content and indexing requirements). Unless the activity is created in response to litigation or regulators, what typically happens is the proverbial can is kicked down to road.
What’s in the Box or WIB™, brings innovative technology to legacy records transforming how legacy records are stored, retrieved, reviewed, and disposed of. WIB™ creates a photo array of records in boxes with a reviewable index of file labels currently stored in warehouses. Our technology stack, utilizing best in breed OCR, lends those boxes and file labels to analytic tools such as clustering, named entity recognition, data extraction and auto-classification. Records Managers will be able to ‘manage’ records more efficiently by having access to a more accurate inventory, reducing costs related to requests and overall off-site storage while minimizing the risk associated with maintaining records past retention.
Capture Process
Capture Video (view from Left)
Analysis, Classification and Attribution
Review
The images can be viewed in the WIB Review Platform or Relativity*. The Analysis, Classification, and Attribution results are displayed with the photos. Boxes can be routed through workflows where users can review the photos and extracted content.
Relativity is a 3rd Party Application requiring a license and support agreement separate from the WIB License and Support Agreements.
Reports
WIB Reports are customizable to each user. Report Graphs and Data can be exported to Microsoft Excel or Adobe PDF for sharing. All the reports are interactive, and users can drill into each element. There are bar charts, line graphs, histograms, pie charts and donut charts available.
Export
Images and metadata can be exported from WIB in multiple formats for import or migration into client Electronic Document Management Systems. Image formats include Group IV Tiff and an array of PDF formats. PDFs can be package to include bookmarks and the OCR from WIB. Metadata files can be delivered in CSV, text, html or json files.
Capture Process
Analysis, Classification and Attribution
Review
The images can be viewed in the WIB Review Platform or Relativity*. The Analysis, Classification, and Attribution results are displayed with the photos. Boxes can be routed through workflows where users can review the photos and extracted content.
Relativity is a 3rd Party Application requiring a license and support agreement separate from the WIB License and Support Agreements.
Reports
WIB Reports are customizable to each user. Report Graphs and Data can be exported to Microsoft Excel or Adobe PDF for sharing. All the reports are interactive, and users can drill into each element. There are bar charts, line graphs, histograms, pie charts and donut charts available.
Export
Images and metadata can be exported from WIB in multiple formats for import or migration into client Electronic Document Management Systems. Image formats include Group IV Tiff and an array of PDF formats. PDFs can be package to include bookmarks and the OCR from WIB. Metadata files can be delivered in CSV, text, html or json files.
What’s in the Box
An apparatus that is self-contained in an ATA case that can be shipped anywhere. The unit takes photos of boxes and their content at a fraction of the cost to store a box giving the end user the ability to view box content in off-site storage from their workstation. Optical/Intelligent Character Recognition (OCR/ICR) provides advanced search capabilities on box content, reduces the retrieval rate of boxes from off-site storage, and provides an audit-able, traceable, and defensible process for managing records.
Records Management
Records Managers can address each of their key concerns by knowing What's in the Box
Patterns of Interest
What’s in the Box Analytics exposes trends in user behavior by evaluating how users explore data versus how data is utilized. Searching for records does not always yield utilization of the records returned in the results of the search. Using statistical distributions, or patterns, to identify real relationships or features of utilized records exposes Patterns of Interest. Patterns of Interest are pivotal in identifying high-value records in archival storage. Records Managers can more efficiently serve their customers by understanding Patterns of Interest for archive records.
Information Governance
An information governance program enables an organization to mitigate risk, achieve business objectives, comply with regulatory requirements, and reduce costs associated with regulatory penalties, storage, and lost productivity. Identifying information assets and knowing the records an organization has is the critical first step to governing that information.
What's in the Box (WIB™) brings hard copy records into the digital arena for Information Governance to leverage the tools used to understand and manage data within an organization.
Information Management
Information management embraces all the generic concepts of management, including the planning, organizing, structuring, processing, controlling, evaluation and reporting of information activities, all of which is needed in order to meet the needs of those with organizational roles or functions that depend on information.
Knowing What’s in the Box in off-site storage facilitates the organization, processing, controlling, evaluating and reporting on the information activities related to each box improving the delivery of information.
Inventory Audit
The foundation of managing records is an accurate inventory. An inventory audits are labor intensive and time consuming while also incomplete if the only thing that is being audited is the container and not the contents of the container. Knowing What’s in the Box gives Records Managers a more granular view of the inventory. Creating an image of the box content allows for a more efficient and effective inventory with qualifiable data and quantifiable volumes.
Box
What’s in the Box is designed to handle each of the archive box sizes from the Standard Letter/Legal Archive box, the most common, which is 15”x12”x10” up to the least common Legal Archive box which is 24”x15”x10”. What’s in the Box Mobile can accommodate any other containers including but not limited to file cabinets, high-density shelving, moving boxes and plastic storage bins, all of which can be found at Records Warehouses.
Metadata
Metadata is data that provides information about other data. It summarizes basic information about data, making finding & working with instances of data easier. Metadata can be created manually or automatically.
What’s in the Box is designed to use a taxonomy or principles of organization to categorize and describe similar items with keywords taking the guess work out of understanding what content is stored in a box. Metadata combined with Analytics and Search tools minimizes the time workers spend trying to find data and shifts the focus to utilizing data.
Legacy Data
Legacy documents include all of the important records that every business must retain – records like incorporation papers, tax returns, partnership agreements, contracts, and other legal documents that need to be preserved and maintained for business continuity and corporate history.
Legacy data, as it relates to records, includes all the metadata for legacy documents and often loses it usability when it cannot be migrated into current systems from acquisitions and merger activity.
What’s in the Box operates on data found in the OCR of the images from a box not on legacy data. Metadata does not have to be migrated to maintain the context of a boxes content.
Records Warehouse
Records Storage Vendors are service providers that store and manage records in warehouses across the globe. They allow clients to move Record Centers to offsite locations at a fraction of the cost of maintaining records within their real-estate fence.
What’s in the Box compliments current services provided by Records Storage Vendors by giving clients a view into the content stored in their warehouses. Traditionally, Record Storage Vendors have provided access to an inventory via the web that is stored in a database. These inventories face the same challenges as migrating legacy data from owner to owner and system to system.
Optical Character Recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image. OCR is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, and text mining. What’s in the Box leverages the OCR text to perform analytics, auto-classification, advanced searches, keywords, and tags. The OCR is the foundation of WIB™ tools.
Intelligent Character Recognition
Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) is the computer translation of hand printed and written characters. Data is entered from hand-printed forms through a scanner, and the image of the captured data is then analyzed and translated by sophisticated ICR software. ICR is similar to optical character recognition (OCR) but is a more difficult process since OCR is from printed text, as opposed to handwritten characters. What’s in the Box leverages the ICR text to perform analytics, auto-classification, advanced searches, keywords, and tags. The OCR is the foundation for each of the tools used in WIB™.
Below is an example of the ICR quality:
Virtual File Room
A virtual file room is an online repository of information that is used for the storing and distribution of documents. In many cases, a virtual data room is used to facilitate the due diligence process during an M&A transaction, loan syndication, or private equity and venture capital transactions. This due diligence process has traditionally used a physical data room to accomplish the disclosure of documents. Setting up a virtual file room requires documents that are digital. This is easy for companies who have scanned archive records and have them in digital format.
Many traditional mistakes made in an M&A event will only be discovered after the deal has closed and left to the acquiring company to “clean up”. The acquiring company inevitably will receive large amounts of paper records that are usually stored in boxes contracted with offsite storage vendors. What’s in the Box can provide visibility into the complete landscape of records and avoid the pitfall of discovery after the close of the deal.
Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory Compliance and Information Governance processes are a vital factor in mitigating risk, reducing cost, and staying current with laws related to data. In relation to records management it is the retention, maintenance and destruction of business records or data.
If an organization chooses to retain their records after any legal requirement, or if they are records that do not have a regulatory statute, if they exist, they can be subject to subpoena and review. One of the records management challenges is to determine the useful or necessary life span of a business record. Business records can have different retention schedules based on how they might be used. At some point, however, they become a liability either in terms of storage space and costs or in terms of their ability to be reviewed by others in a legal situation.
Compliance is ensuring that your records management policy is being followed, and that you are in line with any retention schedules required by law. When an organization is audited by a government entity, compliance with the appropriate laws is one of the items that needs to be verified.
One of the challenges with staying in compliance is the attestation of records for destruction once retention is met. What’s in the Box provides remote review and attestation of box content and satisfies the requirement of review before destruction.
Divesting of Assets
Traditionally, divestitures require a review of massive records volumes which might involve hundreds of reviewers scouring the documents and data page by page. Or documents undergo optical character recognition scanning and other processes to extract text. Given the data volumes involved divestitures, these approaches are considered cost prohibitive and pose challenges in meeting regulatory requirements. Companies needed a solution to effectively disentangle and transfer the records as required while making sure the buyers did not mistakenly receive unrelated and potentially highly sensitive information.
Identifying which records and documents go to a buyer and which stay with the seller can be an expensive process and even take longer than the transaction itself. The process can be incredibly more complex when the transaction involves operations in multiple countries around the world. Determining the proper home for millions of physical documents can be required, with competitive, governance, and regulatory implications.
What’s in the Box provides remote review and attestation of box content and satisfies the requirement of review before the transfer or records from a seller to a buyer at a fraction of the cost to scan the records. Advanced search and Analytics can quickly identify the records that are under the umbrella of a divestiture saving time and costs associated with identifying associated records of the asset being divested.
Review
A Review is work performed by attorneys for their clients. A Legal Review is the process where each party to a case sorts through and analyzes documents and data they possess (and later documents and data supplied by their opponents through discovery) to determine which are sensitive or otherwise relevant to a case.
Reviews require large numbers of documents to be reviewed are litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and government and internal investigations (including internal audits). Often the volume of records supplied are reduced to a fraction during the review process.
Retention Risk Mitigation
Historically, records management has utilized a model for managing records that includes policies, procedures and guidelines focused on the creation, use, retention, and disposal of records. The main risk associated with data is that all data that is retained is potentially discoverable in litigation. Additionally, without regularly implemented policies and procedures for the disposal of data, companies involved in litigation will incur the risk of court sanction, adverse inference judgments or other penalties and fines should they be unable to respond to discovery requests for data that is difficult to locate, lost or destroyed. The disposal of records should not be perceived as haphazard or random; rather, a well-defined and routinely implemented approach to destroying data is how companies best protect themselves from these types of risks.
It is no longer simply an industry best practice to retain vital records as part of a business plan, however. There is now legislation that imposes severe penalties for not producing valid information when requested. This could then lead to liability issues if damages are suffered by the corporation or any third party that relied on the documents.
Files can and should be destroyed after a certain number of years, depending on the type of information. If a file is retained beyond a certain date when it legally could have been destroyed, it can still be used against an organization in legal proceedings.
What’s in the Box reduces risk of civil liability and criminal exposure, for inadequately explained or ill-timed record destruction by providing a repeatable, traceable and reliable process for destruction approval.
What’s in the Box can reduced storage costs for hard-copy documents by keeping the destruction process current through timely records attestation and in the destruction approval process.
What’s in the Box minimizes the burden and stress on management with quicker analyses/assessments in incident-response situations, lawsuits, and regulatory/enforcement requests.
Synonym
What’s in the Box uses words or phrases that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language, for example shut is a synonym of close, to create keywords that will catch all variations of words or phrases in a search.
Acronym
What’s in the Box uses an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word to create keywords that will associate the acronym of a word for all variations of words or phrases in a search.
eDiscovery
Electronic discovery (sometimes known as e-discovery, eDiscovery, ediscovery, or e-Discovery) is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for production in a lawsuit or investigation. What’s in the Box brings hard-copy records into the realm of Discovery by providing an electronic view of records in a box that can be searched and tagged for digital conversion.
Paper
The migration of records and other information management away from paper, toward paperless environments, has been going on since the advent of the computer. As information management increasingly flows to, lives on and is created through electronic media, many have declared paper passé. But by all indications, the predictions of paper’s demise are greatly exaggerated. You have only to look at the stack of it on someone’s desk or count a department’s numerous file manager cabinets to realize that paper is not only still here but flourishing. Call it what you will—necessary evil, inconvenience, archaic information platform—paper, according to an estimate by Coopers & Lybrand, is expanding at the extraordinary rate of 22% per year.
Additionally, what about all those important records that every business must retain – records like incorporation papers, tax returns, partnership agreements, contracts, and other legal documents that need to be preserved and maintained for business continuity and corporate history. Let us face it paper records are not going anywhere anytime soon. The cost to convert all the paper records is cost prohibitive and the reason the companies store millions of records in warehouses across the globe.
What’s in the Box can give companies a view into their paper records at a fraction of the cost to store the record. The national average to store an archive box for 1 year is $19.00 per box (this includes requests, retrievals, delivery and returns).
Litigation
During litigation, or the process of taking legal action, a request for production of documents for discovery can require the preservation, collection, and analysis of tens of thousands of paper records. The current manual process of preserving, collecting, and analyzing those records can be burdensome and inefficient. Litigants have a finite amount of time to respond to a request for production of documents. If the information is electronically stored (ESI) the response can be assisted with eDiscovery tools. To use those tools, the paper must be converted to digital images which is time consuming and expensive.
What’s in the Box™ can leverage keywords to identify, harvest, and produce archive records for a response to a request for document production minimizing the discovery cost associated with litigation.
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Regular expression (regex) is a sequence of characters that specifies a pattern to match in text. Regex is used in many programming languages and is a versatile tool for locating, matching, and manipulating data.
Here are some examples of how regex can be used:
Regex can find or replace strings in search-and-replace dialogs in word processors and text editors.
Regex can check if a user's input matches a specified pattern. For example, a regex can be used to check if a phone number is valid.
Regex can be used in data science to find patterns in large amounts of data.
Regex can be used in natural language processing
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Managing legacy data has always been a daunting task for companies, but with the exponential growth in data consumption (doubling every two years), the problem has become increasingly challenging to handle. The longer companies delay addressing data risks, the worse the situation becomes. Kicking the can down the road is no longer an option, as the can is now kicking back.
Federal, state, and local regulations mandating the retention of specific business records for various periods can be complex, confusing, and even contradictory. Failing to comply with these regulations can result in substantial fines, legal action, and reputational harm. Historically, organizations have adopted the concept of defensible disposal with the intent of avoiding the premature destruction of critical business records.
Defensible disposal was originally designed to ensure that any data targeted for destruction underwent a rigorous review process that included legal, records, and business considerations before approval was granted. However, the time and resources required for this process, coupled with the perception that storage costs were low, led many companies to take the path of least resistance and simply buy more storage to retain data rather than going through the rigorous disposal approval process. The result has been that companies in almost every industry across the world have become data hoarders, retaining vast amounts of data that no longer holds business value yet creates significant risks and compliance concerns.
Keeping data well beyond its retention period was viewed as a business benefit with the hopes of yielding greater value in the future from bigger and richer data sets that may also hold future value. However, the risk-to-reward realization never really materialized. The excess data from data hoarding has resulted in:
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In the world of M&A, organized and accurate business records are far more than a matter of administrative convenience. They are critical to the integrity and success of the entire transaction process. From facilitating thorough due diligence and ensuring accurate valuations to meeting regulatory requirements and managing risks, well-maintained business records underpin every key aspect of M&A transactions. They also play a crucial role in strengthening negotiation positions, streamlining integration, building confidence, and preventing post-transaction disputes. For companies engaged in M&A activities, investing in the meticulous organization and accuracy of business records is not just a best practice but a fundamental requirement for achieving successful and smooth transactions.
Accurate records are crucial for due diligence because they provide a clear, truthful representation of a company's operations and financial health. Disorganized or inaccurate records can obscure critical information, potentially leading to incorrect assessments, overvaluation, or missed risks.
Accurate records help identify potential risks and liabilities. For example, reviewing legal and court records can reveal litigation history, pending lawsuits, judgments, bankruptcies, or liens.
Inaccurate or incomplete records can lead to flawed valuations, which may skew the negotiation terms and result in financial losses or disputes.
Reviewing corporate records helps establish the legal existence and structure of a business entity.
Offsite records storage is the practice of keeping physical documents and files in a secure facility away from an organization's main office. This service can help businesses save space, reduce costs, and protect confidential information.
Offsite records storage can be a good option for inactive documents that are used less frequently. It can also help businesses comply with regulations that require certain paper records to be maintained and stored for a specific period of time.
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