Geoff Hornsby, general manager at iManage (centre), with the iManage London team

Finalists: BigHand; Converge TS; Exponential-e; Forensic Risk Alliance; Infosec Cloud (highly commended); Intapp; Opus 2 International (highly commended).

iManage received the award for Supplier of the Year (Technology) for its work helping the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) overcome data processing issues with its investigation into large-scale bribery and corruption at Rolls-Royce.

The investigation had produced more than 30 million documents, including emails, spreadsheets and other materials, that had to be reviewed and sorted into privileged and non-privileged information, a task that would take a team of junior lawyers months to complete and potentially be prone to human error and inconsistencies.

The SFO instead turned to iManage's artificial intelligence software – RAVN – to read through the documents, using machine learning to train the robot to interpret them faster and more accurately than a human.

The robot was able to plough through 600,000 documents per day, helping the seven-person investigations team build a case against Rolls-Royce at a considerably quicker pace than a manual effort would have allowed and at a much lower cost than paying junior lawyers to carefully trudge through the documents.

"It's a good example of how powerful tech can be – it's a great entry and a clear winner," a judge applauded.