3 Steps to Wave Hours of Legal Discovery Work Goodbye

Picture this: you’re on your way to the office. It’s a beautiful day but you don’t have time to stop and take a moment to breathe in the fresh after-rain air — the only thing on your mind is the amount of paper sitting on your desk. Once you arrive, you get to work digging through stacks of discovery documents brought to you in a less–than–organized manner by your legal opposition. After painstakingly combing through a mountain of paperwork, you find that first critical piece of information you were looking for – but there’s no time to celebrate. It’s on to the next long search. You ask yourself if you’re ever going to find all the needles in the haystack. Could there be something more technologically advanced to help conquer the overflowing paperwork in a more efficient way?  

If wasting time searching through piles of discovery documents sounds familiar to you, it may be time to consider utilizing OCR technology to make these documents text-searchable and accelerate the search process. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.  

1. Create digital versions of the documents.

Digitalization is the first step to take your documents into the 21st century. Scanning your documents to a computer creates digital image files that are ready for conversion. This can be done in-house using document capture software, or through a third-party. If you’re unsure of which will better suit your needs, check out our article on using software vs. outsourcing. 

If you’re already working with scanned or born-digital documents, you’re already one step ahead! 

2. Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.

Manually searching through paper or image–based documents word–by–word is exhausting and time-consuming. With OCR technology, scanned images can be converted to fully text-searchable documents, which is a critical step in an effective digitization process.  

3. Open the converted document and instantly search for the information you need. 

After OCRing image-based documents, you can now interact with the text layers and search for the specific information you need using simple, instantaneous keyword search.  

If you’re still manually rifling through paper to find information, it’s time to re-evaluate your law office’s document management workflow. Streamline your process by implementing OCR technology – you’ll thank yourself later.  

Contact us to learn more.