Combing through thousands of documents during case preparation is not only frustrating – it is a very inefficient use of time. Luckily, OCR scanning offers a way to speed up the process.
While similar to simple document scanning, OCR goes several steps further: It creates digital, searchable versions of legal documents that can be retrieved instantly.
In this article, we’re examining how mobile OCR technology enhances document management for legal businesses.
What is OCR?
Although plain document scanning and scans with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are superficially similar, the latter goes much further. OCR actually converts the text on an image into machine-readable data, instead of merely digitizing the document. Humans can read the text on a picture – but without OCR, machines cannot.
Some modern OCR software additionally comes with data capture functionality. Such a feature extracts only relevant pieces of information and returns them in key-value pairs, an important prerequisite for automatic processing.
Thus, OCR not only produces searchable documents, but also facilitates automated processing in backend systems.
Benefits of OCR: Why it is crucial for legal businesses
Offices process torrents of legal documents every day. Worse, contracts, court filings, corporate records, and other documents often come in different layouts and variable quality. Simple document scanning is insufficient for automatic processing.
The solution to these challenges is advanced OCR. Modern text recognition software has a number of benefits in legal document processing:
- Higher efficiency and productivity: OCR cuts time spent on manual data entry and document handling, allowing legal professionals to focus on higher-value tasks in case preparation.
- Improved accuracy and reduced errors: OCR eliminates human data entry errors, ensuring digital records are exact copies of the physical ones, which is crucial in legal work.
- Enhanced compliance and security: OCR facilitates the digitization, storage, and management of documents. This improves audit readiness and data integrity. Some OCR solutions use on-device processing only, helping firms comply with data protection laws.
- Streamlined document retrieval: Easy access to organized, searchable documents promotes informed legal decision-making. Being able to directly search for specific content, instead of only for file names, dramatically speeds up searches for information.
- Cost savings: Physical space reserved for document storage can be reduced or repurposed.
Mobile OCR scanning solves document challenges in the legal industry
OCR accuracy is highly dependent on the quality of the input image. Less-than-ideal images with blurry text, skewing, shadows, and low contrast pose a serious challenge. In legal document processing, however, such faults are a common occurrence.
Furthermore, documents often have complex or unique layouts, which cause difficulties for older, less specialized OCR technology.
Overcoming these hurdles requires modern OCR technology, backed by advanced image processing and powerful machine vision models.
This is where the Scanbot OCR SDK comes into play. Integrated into an app, it turns ordinary smart devices into powerful OCR scanners.
Mobile OCR scanners can be used anywhere, anytime, releasing staff from their dependence on fixed scanner devices. Unlike such dedicated hardware, smartphones and tablets are easy to carry around and offer multiple functionalities, such as communicating with colleagues or clients.
How the Scanbot OCR SDK transforms legal documents into searchable PDFs
The Scanbot OCR SDK takes less than an hour to integrate into any web or mobile app, thanks to its Ready-to-Use UI Components. Building on our Document Scanner SDK, it delivers high-quality OCR scanning – completely offline.
This is how it works, from capture and pre-processing to the output:
- Image capture
The user scans a physical document with their mobile phone. In-depth user guidance, including instructions on how to hold and angle the phone, and features such as auto-cropping ensure a smooth experience.
- Image processing
This is a critical step, as OCR performance heavily depends on the quality of the input images. Therefore, the Scanbot SDK optimizes the initial scan with several image processing techniques:
- Deskewing: This straightens scans that are slightly angled, which is vital for the OCR engine to establish text baselines. They are needed for accurate character alignment and recognition.
- Image filters: The image is converted to grayscale, since color information is not necessary for text recognition. The result are cleaner backgrounds and sharper text characters. Binarization can further convert the image into pure black-and-white, creating maximum contrast between text and background. These filters also reduce image noise, such as dust specks.
- Image quality control
The Scanbot Document Scanner SDK includes a Document Quality Analyzer. It analyzes the quality of a scan, rates it against a customizable threshold, and will prompt users to retake the scan if needed. The Document Quality Analyzer ensures that documents are captured with optimal quality and are suitable for subsequent OCR processing.
- Character Recognition
After image processing, the OCR engine analyzes the scanned document to detect the individual lines, words, and characters. The SDK’s superior pattern recognition leverages modern neural networks. It reliably recognizes text even under challenging conditions, such as low lighting, shadows, skewed text, or poor print quality.
- Output
Once the text has been extracted, it is turned into machine-readable data. The Scanbot OCR SDK can deliver both searchable PDFs and plain text, as required by your specific use case.
All our SDKs work strictly offline – there are no connections to third-party servers. This ensures the safety of highly sensitive data in legal documents.
Start OCR scanning today
With its Ready-to-Use UI Components, you can set up a fully functional OCR scanner app with just a few lines of code – even in a single, self-contained HTML file, thanks to the Scanbot Web Document Scanner SDK.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0" />
<title>OCR Document Scanner</title>
</head>
<body style="margin: 0">
<button id="scan-document">Scan document</button>
<script type="module">
import "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/scanbot-web-sdk@7.1.0/bundle/ScanbotSDK.ui2.min.js";
const sdk = await ScanbotSDK.initialize({
enginePath:
"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/scanbot-web-sdk@7.1.0/bundle/bin/complete/"
});
document
.getElementById("scan-document")
.addEventListener("click", async () => {
const config = new ScanbotSDK.UI.Config.DocumentScanningFlow();
const scanResult = await ScanbotSDK.UI.createDocumentScanner(config);
const pages = scanResult?.document?.pages;
if (!pages || !pages.length) {
return;
}
const options = { pageSize: "A4", pageDirection: "PORTRAIT", pageFit: "FIT_IN", dpi: 72, jpegQuality: 80, runOcr: true };
const bytes = await scanResult?.document?.createPdf(options);
function saveBytes(data, name) {
const extension = name.split(".")[1];
const a = document.createElement("a");
document.body.appendChild(a);
a.style = "display: none";
const blob = new Blob([data], { type: `application/${extension}` });
const url = window.URL.createObjectURL(blob);
a.href = url;
a.download = name;
a.click();
window.URL.revokeObjectURL(url);
}
saveBytes(bytes, "document-scan.pdf");
});
</script>
</body>
</html>Feel free to copy the code into an HTML file and open it in your browser. When moving to production, we recommend you download the SDK and host it on your server instead of using a CDN.
You can run the Scanbot SDK from your project for 60 seconds per session without a license. For more in-depth testing, generate a free trial license.
Do you want to learn more about the SDK? Our experts are always happy to chat. Simply message us at sdk@scanbot.io.
How Morgan & Morgan achieves document scans fit for OCR processing with the Scanbot SDK
Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury law firm in the US, improved its client app by replacing simple photo uploads of crucial legal documents with crisp document scanning in its client app. The image quality of their previous solution was consistently too low, requiring frequent manual intervention and delaying claims processing.
Now, with the Scanbot SDK, users take high-quality scans suitable for automatic OCR processing. Morgan & Morgan’s backend system is able to classify the documents and recognize the text using OCR. Its attorneys rapidly receive legible documents and can proceed to work on the case.
If you want to learn more about how the Scanbot SDKs can streamline your legal processes, please message us at sdk@scanbot.io.
