The Serious Fraud Office has introduced an ‘artificial intelligence lawyer’ to speed up investigations ahead of its largest case yet involving over 80 million documents.

The launch follows a successful live pilot in a case involving Rolls-Royce, at the time, the SFO’s largest investigation with 30 million documents submitted for review, and the UK’s first criminal case to make use of AI.

It will begin managing all new cases with the technology from this month, with one case already exceeding Rolls-Royce in size with over 50 million documents requiring review and another larger than both cases combined.

Previously, only independent barristers were used to comb through thousands of complex documents to identify evidence that could or couldn’t be seen by SFO investigators prior to them even beginning to sift through the documents themselves.

The amount of data handled by its digital forensics team has quadrupled in the last year and is expected to soar as company data grows ever larger.

By automating document analysis, AI technology allows the SFO to investigate more quickly, reduce costs and achieve a lower error rate than via the work of human lawyers, alone.

Able to process more than half a million documents a day, a pilot “robot” was recently used to scan for legal professional privilege content in the SFO’s Rolls-Royce case at speeds 2,000 times faster than a human lawyer.

Not only will the new AI document review system be able to recognise patterns, group information by subject, organise timelines, and remove duplicates, it will eventually be able to sift for relevancy thereby removing documents unrelated to an investigation.

SFO’s Chief Technology Officer, Ben Denison said: “AI technology will help us to work smarter, faster and more effectively investigate and prosecute economic crime.

“Using innovative technology like this is no longer optional – it is essential given the volume of material we are dealing with and will help ensure we can continue to meet our disclosure obligations and deliver justice sooner, at significantly lower cost.”