Law practices and the benefits of scanning and the use of OCR

Benefits of Scanning to a legal firm

Law practices will handle thousands of documents every day. Digitising these documents has revolutionised the operational process of many practices.

There are many reasons that have led to this change, but the principal one is that when legal documents are scanned there is no need to retain the hard copies, thus eliminating bulky files and space consuming cabinets in expensive office space.

Once in a digital format they can be safely and securely stored on external storage devices or cloud-based systems.

Using the cloud, documents and files can be shared with multiple colleagues wherever their location via most web enabled devices.

What is OCR?

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology that recognizes text within a digital image. The scanned documents containing typed, printed or handwritten text are converted into machine-encoded text.

Benefits of OCR to a legal firm

Performing OCR on digital files offers multiple benefits. However, due to the lack of proper understanding of OCR, many practices do not incorporate it.

The misconception is that after documents are scanned, they remain as static images, and it is difficult to identify one document from another.

However, using OCR they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line and extracted text-to-speech, making the files more dynamic and usable.

With OCR it is also possible to convert digitally scanned images to editable files. These electronic files may be of different formats, such as Word files, CSV, PDF, Excel spreadsheets, XML and other variations.

These are easily searchable and there is no difficulty in locating items quickly on external storage devices or cloud-based systems.

OCR enables the users to find documents by typing keywords or phrases that are known to be in the document. Thus, even if the user is not aware of the actual file name, they can find the documents quickly and easily.

This saves a considerable amount of time searching that file or document.

Professional Document Management (PDM)

PDM assist professionals in the scanning, OCR and storage of documents safely and securely.

To be assured of quality image production, accuracy, and security, contact Andrew Thirkill on 01274 883459 or andy@pro-doc.co.uk