Robotic Process Automation Streamlines Workflow And Improves Accuracy Of Claims In Class Action Litigation

When the firm needed to manage more than 200,000 award letters from the Social Security Administration for plaintiff beneficiaries in an unprecedented class action, the Kelley Information Services team implemented robotic process automation to cut down manual effort to a fraction of the time previously required.

The Challenge

On behalf of the plaintiffs in this class action, Kelley Drye was responsible for receiving and tracking letters issued by the Social Security Administration to the 129,691 class members. The letters reported the results of the agency’s court-ordered recalculations of the members’ prior existing benefits to determine whether additional money was owed. The workflow for managing this process was tedious and manual – an individual opened and scanned each letter, then manually transcribed relevant metadata and information into Excel. After several months and an influx of hundreds of letters that arrived daily, it became abundantly clear that the process was impractical, vulnerable to human error, and unsustainable.

The Solution

The Kelley Information Services (KIS) team worked with the lawyers and paralegals managing this matter to streamline the process by investing in UiPath for robotic process automation (RPA). The new workflow consisted of bulk scanning letters into PDF, which UiPath was able to ​“read,” break into separate files, and extract information into a database. UiPath was set up to recognize specific text, e.g., name, address, and dollar amounts, and pulled relevant data into a SQL database.

The Impact

The use of RPA was an incredible time saver and helped reduce the chance of errors in recording funds due to claimants. With UiPath, the Kelley Drye team only needed to manually review 13 percent of documents, which were flagged as a result of formatting or spelling errors – down from reviewing 100 percent of documents manually under the prior process. Over the span of a year and a half, the firm processed all of the tens of thousands of agency-issued letters in the case. The KIS team’s work was invaluable in assisting the Kelley Drye lawyers and paralegals to respond to questions from class members about the letters they received, and to bring to the attention of the Social Security Administration calculation errors found in the letters for correction.