Morrison & Foerster LLP - Translation & OCR

During a major intellectual property case, one of the world's leading litigation firms found itself with over 175,000 words that needed to be translated into English in less than 10 days, including Christmas and New Years. The majority of the files – many of which were in PDF format – would have to be extracted from a Concordance database, then translated and reinserted. Despite the remarkably tight turnaround and the technical difficulties presented by the project, TLS provided a turnkey solution, successfully delivering the translations within the specified timeframes and according to the strict regulations of the court.

The Client
With a network of more than one thousand lawyers in offices around the world, Morrison & Foerster offers its clients comprehensive, global legal services in the corporate and litigation domains. The firm is distinguished by its renowned litigation skills, its unrivaled reach across the Pacific Rim – particularly in Japan and China – and its unsurpassed expertise in finance, life sciences, and technology. Consistently on the American Lawyer's A-List, Morrison & Foerster has been cited several times as one of the top intellectual property litigation practices in the country.

The Challenge
Morrison & Foerster (MoFo) was contracted to manage a colossal patent infringement dispute. The case, which spanned several continents, involved nearly all of the world's largest manufacturers of durable goods. The proceedings were moving along very rapidly, and a number of depositions were taking place in locations all around the world.

Two days before Christmas, MoFo unexpectedly found itself with over 175,000 words of highly technical Japanese and German documents which needed to be translated into English in less than 10 business days. Faced with this exceptionally short timeframe, MoFo required a vendor who could not only translate the documents according to the court's strict requirements, but who could also complete the project over the Christmas and New Years holidays. To further complicate matters, the majority of the documentation was stored on a hard drive and hosted in a Concordance database. This material would need to be extracted from the database, flowed into a TXT format for translation, and then inserted back onto the hard drive in the Concordance format. Lastly, the German files required for the case were all in PDF format, and many contained complex drawings and charts. These files would not only need to be recreated from scratch, but each translated version would have to remain precisely true to the source document in order to be considered valid in court.

The Solution
As the leading provider of litigation support services to the legal industry, TransPerfect Legal Solutions (TLS) had the resources and experience to meet all of Morrison & Foerster's needs. Within one hour of being notified of the project, TLS's East Coast document management division was already coordinating with the client to map out a production flow schedule for the Concordance database work. Simultaneously, TLS's New York language production center was triaging the overall project by prepping linguists, creating timelines, and coordinating the transfer of 7 GB of database files.

To simplify matters for MoFo, TLS provided a single point of contact to manage every part of the complex project. Drawing from our worldwide network of rigorously certified linguists, TLS assembled a team of native-speaking translators who were not only experts in the subject matter of the case, but were also able to work over the Christmas and New Year holidays. Meanwhile, utilizing state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology (which scans the text in non-editable paper and digital documents and creates editable text files), TLS was able to recreate the German PDF documents from scratch. Our rigorous quality control processes ensured that the new files were absolutely true to the source documents.