Vol. 77, No. 4, April
2004
Learn to Use Your Scanner Effectively
Rather than bemoan the scanner for what it can't do, learn to use
your scanner in a way that is compatible with its capabilities - that
is, to create and manage digitally imaged documents.
Ross L. Kodner,
Marquette 1986, is a "recovering lawyer" who founded MicroLaw Inc., Milwaukee, a legal
technology consultancy and systems integrator in 1985. His firm serves
the technology needs of small to medium-sized law firms and legal
departments worldwide. He served for four years as the chair of the ABA
Law Practice Management Section's Computer & Technology Division,
and was a member of the ABA Techshow Executive Board for five years.
by Ross L. Kodner
Law offices are buried in paper. Pleadings. Correspondence. Briefs.
Exhibits. Memos. Paper is everywhere, choking and clogging the flow of
work in both private and public law practices. Sometimes getting client
work out is more an issue of managing mounds of paper than applying
legal brilliance.
For years, lawyers have been on a holy quest for the fabled
"paperless office." This endlessly elusive concept is likely the
"Greatest Lie of the Technology Age." We're never going to become
paperless, at least in the foreseeable future. We need to accept that
even if we reduce the amount of paper we generate, other people will
continue to send us paper.
Microfiche was supposed to be the answer, but microfiche isn't used
often in law firms, because of the general inability to access the
material from the PCs we use to do our work. Scanning was supposed to be
the next great answer.
Scanning generally has been unsatisfactory, because we have
considered the term "scanning" as being synonymous with "OCR" (Optical
Character Recognition). In other words, most people equate scanning with
trying to use software to identify the characters on a page and turn the
page into an editable word processing document. Good idea conceptually,
but in practice, this process is far from perfect. Even with the best
OCR software reaching text recognition accuracy levels as high as 97
percent, OCR just is not good enough. There are four problems here:
1) 97 percent accuracy in text recognition is akin to three screwed
up characters out of every 100. With a single-spaced page of text
containing about 2,200 words on average, that's 66 errors per page on
average.
2) OCR software tends to be unsuccessful at retaining the formatting
and layout of the original scanned document. For example, a clean, laser
printed local state court pleading, when scanned, could be a nightmare
of reformatting, with a caption that defies clean-up, and equally
baffling line spacing and odd tab stops. OCR software tries its best to
figure out what codes or styles to apply in the target word processing
format - but it's really just guessing.
3) OCR is slow. Even if you have a PC equipped with a high-end 3.2
ghz Pentium 4, the OCR process can be slow, and it seems with every
increase in accuracy there is a geometric leap in the processing
requirements.
4) There is a wide expectation gap between what we think can
be scanned successfully with OCR software and those documents that
actually can be scanned successfully with OCR software. For
instance, a preprinted state-specific divorce financial disclosure form
replete with boxes and lines galore will not be successful, because of
complicated formatting.
Enter the Paperless Office
Equating scanning with OCR is a mistake. Replace it with the
paperless office concept: Turn physical paper into "digital paper" by
using low-cost, high-simplicity image scanning. Image scanning is the
process of using a scanner to effectively photocopy documents onto a
computer system. This creates digital paper, ideally stored in the
universally readable PDF format.
Digital paper takes up no physical space and is manipulated easily by
software on PC systems. Digital paper is a picture of the original
document, identical in every way without any of the vagaries of the OCR
process. Of course, it isn't editable text at this point - you merely
have a picture of the document. But most of the time, that's all you
need.
Say you have a digital paper/PDF of the scanned document: a letter
from opposing counsel, a set of interrogatory responses, the curriculum
vitae of a prospective expert witness, or a stack of hospital records.
What does it accomplish having all these pictures of noneditable text?
Saving the time it takes to track down the physical file. Document
searching time costs money - dollars wasted whether it is lawyer time or
staff time. In other words, we can use a scanner for its best purpose -
creating images - rather than using it for its less-than-perfect OCR
ability.
One of the core problems in working on client files is that they are
always split among at least two locations. The documents we create are
located internally on our PC systems. The client documents we receive
from outside sources are stored in our paper filing systems. To view all
the correspondence on a client's file, you have to look onscreen for
your own documents and then track down the paper file and rifle through
it to view the externally generated letters. That is, if that particular
file is not in someone's briefcase.
To locate digital information - whether you are using a great
document manager like Worldox or
the document management capabilities inside case managers like
TimeMatters, Amicus Attorney, PracticeMaster, ProLaw, and so on - go to
the client file's folder/directory on your system and look in the
"folder" where you store the correspondence for the client. You will see
document names that begin with "Letter to," which are word processed
documents you created, and document names that begin with "Letter from,"
which are the scanned images of externally generated documents. Now
internal and external documents are in one convenient place! Just double
click and up pops the perfect picture of your document in the Adobe
Acrobat Reader software.
The bottom line is that your client files become electronic and
they're all in one place. You'll save otherwise nonbillable time you
would have wasted just looking for things. You'll also gain the ease of
transporting lightweight, digital client files.
In addition, when you close the file, it's already digital paper.
This is a far better alternative for closed file storage than the costly
space-hungry storage requirements for physical paper files.
Choosing a Scanner
What kind of scanner and software should a firm use to manage digital
paper? Factors to consider include: 1) the intended volume of documents
to be scanned, 2) the number of pages scanned per job, and 3) the budget
for internal scanning versus the cost-effectiveness of outsourced
scanning. As to volume, read the specifications for duty cycles. Buying
a $100 scanner rated for 2,000 pages monthly when your firm needs to
scan 10,000 pages per month will surely smoke that bargain scanner. The
scanner market stratifies this way, roughly:
1) Basic flatbed scanners: Flatbed scanners without automatic
document feeders, $50 - $300. Unsuitable for law firm use because of
cumbersome paper handling.
2) Portable scanners: Visioneer's Strobe XP100 weighs less than a
pound. This smaller-than-an-egg-carton-sized scanner can pull five
imaged pages per minute (ppm) into your computer system for less than
$200, and the best news is that it has no power brick. It's actually
powered by your PC or laptop's USB port.
3) Basic document-fed scanners: $250 - $600. Flatbed scanners with
automatic document feeders. Suitable for scanning up to 15,000 pages
monthly. Look at Visioneer's 9450PDF; models in Hewlett-Packard's
Scanjet series; and several from Microtek. Scanning speeds: 4-8 ppm.
4) Lower mid-range document-fed scanners: $600 - $1,300. Can feed
25-50 pages at speeds from 12-25 ppm. Can handle up to 50,000 pages a
month. Leading products include Visioneer's 9650 at 12 ppm; Visioneer's
Strobe XP450 at 20 ppm; and several Fujitsu models, starting at $600 and
25 ppm.
5) Mid-range document-fed scanners: Fujitsu 93GX has been replaced by
the 3093 series, reliable workhorses with 27 ppm capacity, a rugged
50-page feeder, and fast SCSI interface. $1,800 to $2,400 depending on
configuration.
6) Higher level, higher cost: Fujitsu, Panasonic, Bell & Howell,
Canon, Ricoh, and Kodak produce scanners that push the 100 ppm mark with
massive paper handling ability.
Managing Digital Paper
Now that these images are in your computer system, you need to be
able to organize and search them. Document management and work product
retrieval systems offer the best solution. These software systems can
gently impose a file cabinet-like consistency on how any law practice
organizes its internally created documents and its externally received
and scanned documents. Worldox is the undisputed leader in the small
firm marketplace and also has made inroads into the larger firm segment.
For larger firms, iManage and Hummingbird Docs are popular. Most legal
case management systems also incorporate document management functions
that can adroitly handle scanned electronic paper.
All document management systems let you organize and search scanned
image files. This presumes, of course, that the images are stored in a
format that actually permits content searching of what otherwise would
be only a picture. Documents scanned with Adobe Acrobat 6 or Adobe's
Capture systems are stored in the universally viewable PDF format. PDF
documents now can be "captured image over text" documents. This means
that if the software can recognize the underlying text, the text may be
searchable by a document manager that has PDF-search capabilities.
Worldox excels at this role as part of its overall complement of
document organization, management, and retrieval functions, but isn't
the only tool that can accomplish this.
A common misconception is that the higher the scanned resolution, the
better the text recognition results. In fact, often the opposite is true
- lower scanner resolution settings can yield better recognition. At
higher resolutions, modern scanners can be confused by the fibers of the
paper. Set the resolution at 150 to 200 dpi (dots per inch) for better
text recognition results.
Wisconsin
Lawyer