3 Reasons to Get Rid of Scanned PDFs

Your hilarious college roommate is your friend. Scanned PDFs? Not your friend! At least not in the world of contract management.

Contract management is a crucial part of any business, and it often falls on legal teams to establish best practices. Many organizations have legacy scanned PDFs, which feel like a “secure” option in a world full of increasing data privacy incidents. 

A scanned PDF is the energy vampire of legal teams. They are impossible to search through, create soul-crushing manual tasks, and require many hours to comb through. 

Not convinced? Below are three reasons to toss scanned PDFs from your workflows.

 #1: Dealing with locked documents is a nightmare

Working with document images is difficult and creates significant liability risk. This has become especially relevant in recent years with pandemic-related issues, like Force Majeure clauses that came to light in 2020. Being unable to search your contacts - especially during times of crisis - opens you up to extreme risk.

 #2: Poor quality documents make manual reviews much harder

Sending electronic legal documents can feel like the most high-stakes game of musical chairs ever. To make matters worse, documents vary in quality, consistency, and even readability. The added dynamic of printing, scanning, and reviewing between multiple teams results in an unnecessarily complex process for everyone.

#3: Scanned PDFs are incredibly difficult to convert and manage

One of the main issues with scanned PDFs is that they are unsearchable. Images that are converted to scanned PDFs must be manually reviewed, and specific search terms can’t be looked up automatically. CLM software fixes this with optical character recognition (OCR,) making search terms quick, easy, and accessible.

Using CLM software to get rid of scanned PDFs is one of the first steps to automating your contract repository. If you’re interested in learning how a CLM vendor can streamline your contract management processes, schedule a demo with us today. 

Next week, we’ll explore three tactical ways you can organize your scanned PDFs for better contract organization and better efficiency.