- July 2, 2020
- FOXITBLOG
Handling documents in the legal industry can be as tedious as shoveling snow; it’s back-breaking and seemingly endless. With every case comes another flurry of paperwork that needs to be either relegated to a file cabinet or converted into an electronic document.
The question is; if you can toss out your shovel for a snow blower, why not do the same with document processing? Foxit provides simple, effective solutions that help law firms plow through all types of documents – and here’s how we do it.
1. Efficient Information Retrieval
A typical day in a law office goes like this: paper forms magically stack into columns on desks, emails stream in with Word documents, PDF files, and scanned image documents, and you need to search through all of that to find one file. Short of growing eight additional arms, how is it possible to keep track of everything, especially when the files are all in different formats?
One such firm, Hargraves McConnell & Costigan, decided to answer that problem by licensing Foxit’s PDF Compressor to process up to 75,000 pages per month. Prior to the implementation, they had to manually look through papers and read scans to locate the documents they needed. The program allowed them to convert all of their files into text-searchable PDFs, enabling employees to find and retrieve information instantaneously.
2. Document Portability
Even though physical stacks of paper are gone, electronic files are still hard to manage due to large file sizes. Legal documents often exceed 100 pages and have slow download times, making it difficult for attorneys to access case files when working at remote trial sites. Also, attempting to transfer those files via email with a size limitation almost always results in failure.
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, a New York-based law office, realized this issue, and turned to Foxit to solve it. After the firm had implemented an OCR solution to create text-searchable PDFs, they found that the large file sizes were near-impossible to work with. Fortunately, Foxit’s PDF Compressor was able to integrate seamlessly with their existing systems, EMC Captiva InputAccel, to provide the missing element: file compression. The client’s lawyers now enjoy increased work mobility, as they can take documents with over 2000-3000 pages, quickly download them to their laptops, and work on cases while on–the–go.
3. Painless Court Submission
For a sector that handles copious amounts of large documents, it can be a challenge complying with e-discovery laws. When there are hundreds of real estate contracts or affidavits that need to be submitted for e-filing, it can not only be a headache, but cause impractical delays.
One of our clients, John O’Brien & Associates, is based in Australia, where the court system has a 10MB file size limit for e-filing. With large scanned documents coming in from other lawyers and clients, it was challenging to manage discovery documents and meet the requirements of critical submissions to court portals. After leveraging PDF Compressor, the practice was able to compress their scanned documents by as much as 99%, largely easing the difficulties, they previously faced with court submission file size limits.
Contact us to learn more.