LitFin are experts in complex litigation funding. They focus primarily on damages compensation in various antitrust cases, arbitrations, insolvency and related activities. The first company to provide financial solutions for medium and large disputes in Central and Eastern Europe, they have grown into one of Europe’s leading litigation funders.
In 2021, LitFin took on a German antitrust case. The Bundeskartellamt (the Federal Cartel Office in Germany) found that, between 1998 and March 2015, wholesalers had entered into antitrust agreements on uniform price lists, discounts and sales prices for retailers and end customers.
German law assumes buyers of plant protection products have been harmed because products affected by the cartel are regularly sold at a premium. Therefore, any farmer who purchased directly or indirectly between July 1998 and June 2016 (i.e. until the end of the after-effect period) can file a claim for damages.
LitFin is now providing fully financed and risk-free participation for the affected buyers. The case has impacted all farmers that used pesticides in Germany during this period, with an estimated purchase volume of approximately €30 billion.
In order to examine the case, LitFin needs to extract and analyse data from all documents which can be used as evidence; for example, documents (invoices, bank statements, credit notes, etc.) confirming the buyers have purchased from the wholesalers within the specified period. This can range from hundreds to thousands of documents per client. The documents were generally extremely poor quality, containing a high density of scanning artefacts and noise.
Having previously followed a manual process and semi-automatic systems on similar cases, LitFin knew how time-consuming it would be to manually extract data from the case documents and decided to transition to an automated solution.
LitFin initially spoke to 10 Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) providers before narrowing the list to the three best-fit solutions. The company was impressed by Evolution AI’s pricing and adaptability of the technology. Ultimately, it was the exceptional level of customer care and service that led to the final decision.
“I would say the customer care was the biggest selling point for us.” - Jakub Sokol, Financial Manager at LitFin.
Of course, it was crucial for LitFin to partner with a data extraction specialist who was agile and understood their specific needs. “Our use case is a bit different to a typical client,” said Jakub. “Therefore, we needed a kind of flexibility, which Evolution AI was able to provide.”
Evolution AI’s technology is a crucial part of a complex, multi-stage process. Firstly, clients upload their documents to LitFin. LitFin then uploads the documents to Evolution AI’s platform, which processes the documents and extracts the data. Once validated, the data is exported and fed into specialised software for economic and legal analysis.
Since implementing Evolution AI’s automated data extraction technology, LitFin has doubled productivity immediately and is expecting to further increase output. This is being enabled by the platform’s self-learning capability, ensuring results continue to improve over time.
“Evolution AI are essential to our future growth ambitions...” - Jakub Sokol, Financial Manager at LitFin.
LitFin aims to achieve €3.9 billion in claims by 2025. Having focused primarily on B2B cases across Europe, the company is now expanding into the B2C market in order to achieve this long-term objective. B2C cases typically involve a much larger volume of documents, meaning Evolution AI’s automation solution will be a key factor in LitFin’s roadmap for success.
