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OCR Simplified: What It Is and Why Your Business Needs It


Lawyers deal with lots of jargon and acronyms, but one term your legal team absolutely should understand OCR. OCR, which stands for optical character recognition, is the critical legal technology you didn't know you needed. Locked, scanned PDFs can be a huge headache for legal teams because you can’t simply do a control-F search to find key terms and information in the document. In this guide, we will break down what OCR is, why you need it, and provide an overview of what’s on the market today.

What is OCR? 

OCR is a technology that can read text in images. OCR software converts locked content such as scanned PDFs, faxes, or photographs of documents into readable, searchable text files. What once was a snapshot of a contract taken on a blurry phone camera can become a conventional text document, ready for fresh redlines. 

The Breakdown

Different OCR softwares differ slightly in how they process characters. Here are some of the basics:

First, the scanner analyzes the structure of the document for the dark and light areas, distinguishing the characters from the background as well as separating images, tables etc. Then, the software analyzes the document by dividing words from one another and then individual characters. Lastly, when the characters are detected they are turned into code that computers can further manipulate so that we can easily read and proof the documents. 

OCR software uses 2 main methods to determine the correct characters on the page, pattern recognition, and feature detection. The combination of both of these methods with a layer of AI is what makes the most accurate OCR programs.

  • Pattern recognition: This method is where the OCR software has been trained to recognize specific fonts (Arial, Times, Courier, etc.). This is helpful if all your documents are in those fonts, but in this day and age that is never a guarantee.
  • Feature detection: To put it simply, this is breaking down a letter into lines and strokes. Take the letter “A”, for example: you have two angled lines that meet at the top and a horizontal line connecting them at the middle. The majority of the time, regardless of font, that shape will be detected as a capital “A”.

Many OCR solutions use AI that has been fed thousands of images to learn characters and easily detect fonts. Every legal team needs an OCR tool so that scanned or faxed agreements (like those your firm signed 10 or 20 years ago) can be brought into modern document management and analysis solutions. Choosing the right OCR solution for your legal staff is more critical than you might expect.

What Should I Use to Convert PDF Contracts?

There are a number of free tools available, as well as well-known names such as  Adobe, Microsoft, and others. 

Freeware OCR solutions like SimpleOCR and FreeOCR are often bundled with Microsoft Windows PCs, and major document management solutions like Adobe Document Cloud and Google Drive have built-in OCR capabilities. These are fine for consumer or even everyday business usage, but they often fall short for legal teams.

Where Traditional OCR Falls Short

These solutions can struggle to deal with complex or low-quality images, converting a blurry letter M into a pair of Ns, failing to recognize vertical columns of text on the same page, or misinterpreting background images, notary stamps, or watermarks as part of the text on the page. Given all the fancy ways that tools like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat can allow you to lay out a document, even a brand-name OCR tool can easily struggle to understand where text begins and ends. That's unacceptable when it comes to contracts.

Traditional OCR works for clearly scanned PDFs, but falls apart when the scan is imperfect. The inaccuracy of traditional OCR can create a massive amount of work for your team. They’ll need to look at each document to identify issues and make corrections. If these inaccuracies are not found, this creates risk for teams and companies who need to be able to find this information to make business decisions. 

Legal teams need an advanced, high-fidelity OCR tool that seamlessly connects to their legal document storage, management, and analysis solutions so that they can get scanned, photographed, or e-faxed documents processed and ready for redlines as soon as possible.

LinkSquares built the OCR solution that in-house legal teams need. Using cutting-edge AI trained on millions of legal documents, the built-in LinkSquares OCR engine automatically converts images into high-quality text that software and humans alike can read, edit, analyze, and organize. Any multifunction printer/scanner or smartphone camera can feed your legal documents to the LinkSquares Cloud, where AI will help you parse, monitor and manage those contracts and agreements quickly. LinkSquares has a dedicated team that monitors OCR performance to allow us to proactively address issues through QA so our users never have to worry about the quality of their output. The result of this OCR process is the ability to do full-text search on any contract with confidence.

Conclusion

OCR has been widely available for over two decades, and the technology has advanced greatly in that time. Still, legal teams need to be very particular about the quality and features of the OCR systems they employ, because the accuracy of language is critical when it comes to legal documents.

LinkSquares’ proprietary Smart OCR process gives you the fastest and most comprehensive contract management and analysis on the market, even for your locked, scanned PDFs. If your legal team is ready to start harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and get ahead of the curve – contact LinkSquares today.