His Majesty Courts and Tribunal Service (United Kingdom)

Business need

To improve the experience for users of its online will search-and-order service, while increasing scope for future innovation.

Solution

Iron Mountain provided a service which stored more than 41 million physical probate records, with 250,000 new wills added every year at our secure facility.

In addition, Iron Mountain has supported HMCTS in a recent project to significantly improve public access to the archive. Between 1858 and 1972, every Probate Registry maintained a calendar in book form (known as the Ledger) in which grants of Probates were recorded. Over the years, Iron Mountain scanning specialists digitised some of those records but many remained in fragile paper form.

In 2022, to fully digitise the Ledger, Iron Mountain converted 870,000 pages from the Ledger in just two weeks and launched a new access portal for the general public. Iron Mountain also provided a solution which utilises OCR and Machine learning capabilities to read, process and sort wills, extracting content accurately from typed and handwritten text thus reducing processing time to sort and digitise these wills.

Results

Along with a transformed website, HMCTS can deliver better, faster outcomes for probate users, genealogists, solicitors and the public. This gives the public access to instantly available pre-digitised wills, meeting GOV.UK site standards with increased search accuracy and speed. We also provided a single records interface and simplified user experience.