Beyond Manual Review: How Automated Personal Information Detection Is Reshaping Legal Workflows

For years, legal teams have navigated an increasingly complex information landscape. Discovery sets have evolved from neatly typed documents into sprawling collections of emails, PDFs, scanned pages, mobile phone exports, chat logs, images, screenshots, photos of documents, and handwritten notes. Every one of these formats is capable of containing sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that must be identified and protected before documents are shared or produced.

The challenge isn’t just volume, it’s unpredictability. A single evidence bundle might contain pristine digital files alongside blurred scans, sideways photos, or hurried handwritten statements. And within these materials lie thousands of data points that carry regulatory, ethical, and reputational risk if exposed.

In response to this growing pressure, legal organisations are turning to automated AI‑driven solutions that can help them detect and redact personal information quickly, accurately, and defensibly. At EzeScan, we’ve been working on exactly that. An intelligent, review‑friendly PII detection platform designed to meet the realities of legal practice.
 

Why Legal Teams Need a New Approach

Legal professionals know the stakes better than anyone. A missed date of birth can jeopardise a case. An exposed licence number can breach privacy law. A single unredacted address in a production can undermine privilege, trigger regulatory obligations, or create reputational consequences.

Yet many firms still rely on manual review processes that were never designed for the scale or complexity of today’s evidence sets.

Manual review workflows are:

• Slow — consuming hours of high‑value fee earner and support staff time
• Expensive — particularly when document volumes spike during discovery
• Inconsistent — human reviewers vary in speed and accuracy
• Risk‑exposed — even a momentary oversight can cause disclosure

The legal industry needs a way to quick and efficient way to detect personal information across large, inconsistent, unpredictable document collections without sacrificing accuracy, oversight, or defensibility.
 

Transforming Legal Redaction with Intelligent Automation

Leveraging our long‑established foundation in capture automation, intelligent document processing, and deeply integrated EDRMS/DMS solutions, we’ve now introduced advanced AI‑powered technology designed to help organisations, especially law firms, dramatically reduce the time and effort involved in locating and redacting personal information.

This new capability brings together intelligent detection, flexible review options, and automated output handling to streamline how sensitive information is managed across modern legal workflows. Its core features include:

• Detection across high volumes of unstructured content: Identify sensitive PII within a wide range of legal document formats including emails, PDFs, scanned images, screenshots, handwritten notes, mobile exports, and mixed-format evidence.
• Configurable Detection Rules: Tailor the solution to your firm’s compliance needs by configuring detection for specific data types powered by advanced text analysis, language models, and credit card pattern recognition technology.
• Flexible Redaction Workflows: Create automated or manually controlled redaction processes depending on the sensitivity level or matter type. Support includes both full‑page removal and precision zone‑based redaction for targeted information handling.
• Reason codes for auditability: Apply predefined or custom reason codes to each redaction to support governance, audit trails, and disclosure obligations.
• Automated Output Handling: Automatically generate and store both the original and redacted versions of documents. Output files to your nominated folders, repositories, case management systems, or evidence libraries with intelligent naming options.
• Real-time Repository Crawler: Crawl and analyse documents stored across your firm’s digital landscape including network file shares, email servers, and supported EDRMS platforms. Configure continuous monitoring, scheduled scans, or event‑based ingestion to ensure new documents are assessed the moment they enter the business.
   

Why This Matters for Legal Professionals

• Reduced time spent searching for personal information
• Improved accuracy and consistency across matters
• Lower risk of accidental disclosure or missed identifiers
• Scalability for large or complex discovery sets
• Defensible, auditable redaction processes
• Faster, more predictable turnaround times for clients
   

Typical Legal Workflows Enhanced by EzeScan

Legal practices can introduce EzeScan’s discovery and redaction at multiple stages of their document lifecycle:

• Mailroom / Correspondence Automation: Automatically detect and redact sensitive data before routing documents internally.
• Litigation Support & eDiscovery: Rapidly process large volumes of evidence while maintaining client confidentiality.
• Back‑scanning and Digitisation: Clean legacy archives during digitisation, ensuring older case files meet today’s privacy standards.
• Client Records & Case File Management: Apply consistent protection policies across every matter, regardless of practice area.
   

Moving Forward with Smarter, Defensible Redaction

Legal teams need more than just faster processes, they need confidence that every document they handle is protected, compliant, and ready for disclosure. EzeScan’s new AI‑powered PII discovery and redaction capabilities are built to meet that need, giving firms a modern, scalable, and defensible way to safeguard sensitive information across every stage of the legal workflow.

Whether you’re looking to improve turnaround times, reduce risk, or strengthen your organisation’s privacy posture, this new solution is designed to slot seamlessly into the way your teams already work.

You can learn more about this new solution here or request a live demonstration of the new capabilities in action here.