How an ERISA law firm processed 3,177 W-2s in an afternoon, without uploading a single one.
Ferenczy Benefits Law Center needed data from thousands of W-2s containing client personal information. It had to stay confidential, and by hand it would have taken over a week.
The challenge
The firm received 3,177 W-2s combined into one PDF: some clean digital files, some scans, and some pages that weren’t W-2s at all.
Staff needed names, wages, and tax amounts from every form in a spreadsheet. By hand, that’s roughly 53 hours of repetitive, error-prone data entry.
The constraint
Every form contained Social Security numbers and other personal information. Online converters, public AI tools, and outside vendors were all off the table.
The solution had to run on the firm’s own computer, with no internet connection.
What we built
We built a rule-based extraction tool that runs entirely offline. It reads every page, skips non-W-2s, pulls and checks the required fields, and flags anything uncertain for review.
The output is a ready-to-use spreadsheet, created on the firm’s own machine. The data never left the building.
The result
Fortis Works’ automation tool saved our staff invaluable time when processing client PII while preserving the confidentiality of that information. Fortis Works understood the importance of protecting privileged data and built a fantastic closed-loop solution for our firm.
Have a stack of documents like this?
If your team spends hours pulling the same information from the same documents, we can likely build a tool for it that never leaves your office.