About us
We build the capture process, not just supply the scanner
Datacoll8 designs, supplies and supports document capture for law firms and regulated businesses. Hardware, software and extraction models come from one team, because the failures we are called in to fix almost always sit in the gaps between three suppliers.
Our mission
Make every value on a record traceable to the page it came from
A digitised archive is only worth what you can trust from it. Our mission is that any figure, date or clause reference sitting on a matter record can be traced, in one click, back to the region of the page it was read from, with a record of who checked it and when.
That single requirement shapes everything we build. It is why every extracted field carries a confidence score, why verification shows the source page rather than a spreadsheet row, why corrections are logged as training signal rather than filed as complaints, and why the audit trail is produced by the work rather than assembled before an inspection.
Firms do not adopt document automation because it is modern. They adopt it because a matter takes too long, a renewal was missed, or an audit consumed three weeks that nobody had. Those are the outcomes we are accountable for.
Why Datacoll8 exists
Because the hardware was never the reason these projects stalled
Datacoll8 started with a pattern we kept meeting in records rooms. A firm had bought a capable scanner, cleared a store room and put a team on it. Six months later the boxes were gone and nobody could find anything, because separation had been left to whoever was at the device, filenames had four conventions, and indexing had been typed by hand at the end of long afternoons.
The equipment had done exactly what it was sold to do. What was missing was the process around it: an imaging profile per document condition, separation decided before scanning started, filenames assembled from indexed values, and a verification step where a human looked at the things the system was unsure about.
So we built the company around that gap. We specify the hardware, we write the software that controls it, we tune the extraction against your documents, and we stay for the optimisation cycle. One accountable team, from the capture audit to the quarterly review.
Client focus
We chose to be specific rather than general
Datacoll8 works primarily with law firms and in-house legal teams, alongside the regulated businesses that carry similar obligations: financial services, insurance, property and healthcare administration.
Legal documents are difficult in a specific way. The paper is inconsistent, because it comes from counterparties rather than from a form. The important values are buried in clauses rather than printed in labelled boxes. And the consequence of a wrong value is not a reporting error, it is a missed notice period.
Serving that well means knowing what a novation looks like, why a deed cannot go through a feeder, and what a records manager needs to produce when an auditor asks. We would rather know one sector properly than sell a generic capture product into six.
If your documents fall outside that, we will say so at the audit stage rather than after the purchase order.
Our approach to innovation
New models are adopted when they survive our own testing
Extraction research moves quickly and most of it is genuinely useful. What does not follow is that a firm should be the place where it gets tried out. We hold new approaches to the same evidence standard we ask our clients to hold us to.
Measure before you promise
We test extraction against a held-back sample of your own documents and report the result, including where it underperforms. A number produced on another firm's paper tells you nothing about yours.
Design the process, not just the purchase
Separation, naming, thresholds and queue ownership are decided during configuration with the people who will live with them, because those decisions are what determine whether the output is usable.
Keep the human in the right place
Automation should remove rekeying, not judgement. Low-confidence values go to a reviewer with the source page beside them, and every correction is logged and fed back into tuning.
Improve on a cycle, not on complaint
Document sets drift as counterparties change their paper. Scheduled reviews retune templates and thresholds before correction rates become something anyone has to raise.
What we support
The document types we are set up to handle
Each of these has its own capture requirements, its own extraction schema and its own retention rules. We configure them separately rather than treating everything as a generic scan.
Commercial contracts and agreements
Master services agreements, framework contracts, licences, NDAs and their amendments and side letters, extracted down to clause level.
Case and matter files
Full case bundles digitised, separated and indexed by matter reference so a file arrives searchable rather than as a scanned lump.
Property and conveyancing packs
Deeds, titles, leases and searches, including bound and oversized originals captured on overhead and flatbed hardware.
Client onboarding and KYC
Identity documents, corporate structures and source-of-funds paperwork, captured with the retention rules onboarding requires.
Litigation and discovery bundles
High-volume disclosure captured, deduplicated and paginated, with consistent output that downstream review tools can accept.
Corporate records and archives
Board minutes, registers and historic correspondence brought into a single searchable archive with a defensible retention schedule.
Book a demo
Start with a capture audit
Before anything is specified we look at what your archive is actually made of, how much arrives each day and who needs to scan it. The audit is where the honest answers come from.
Demos run Monday to Friday, 08:30 to 18:00 GMT
