How Outsourcing Copes With Dutch Anonymization Laws in the Production of Caselaw Databases

From last week’s Publishers’ Weekly, a good overview of how the trade publishing industry is employing Indian coders to embed .xml into works. But a paragraph on Innodata Isogen, which I thought of as doing law firm outsourcing shows just how globally linked the outsourcing of the production of legal information has become.

No KPO (knowledge processing outsourcing) project is too complex for Innodata Isogen. Take a recent job that entailed producing marketable Dutch jurisprudence information within the guidelines of European laws, which prohibit the disclosure of any information that could identify the parties involved. “The anonymization process was challenging, since any individual is likely to be cited in multiple connecting documents,” recalls Jan Palmen, senior v-p for publishing practice. For this particular project, the original records were digitized and cleaned up by a team in Sri Lanka (a former Dutch colony), analyzed and edited by a Dutch-speaking team of lawyers in Israel and then marked up in XML by the Sri Lankan team before going to the client for review and distribution.

And we think handling privacy and data protection and cross-border information transfer in two languages are a challenge.