Why Is OCR Important?

Welcome back to the two-part blog series on Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In part one, we covered what OCR is. Now that you know what OCR is, how do you choose a tool? We’ve got you covered. Here’s an overview of free tools, 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 acceptable for everyday usage but fall short for legal teams.

Where Traditional OCR Falls Short

These solutions struggle with complex or low-quality images, converting a blurry letter ‘M’ into a pair of ‘N’s, for example. Accuracy is typically around 70-80%, which is unacceptable when it comes to contracts. The inaccuracy of traditional Optical Character Recognition creates a massive amount of work. They’ll need to look at each document to identify issues and make corrections.

Specialty solutions like Kofax OmniPage, Abbyy Finereader, and Rossum Data Capture offer more sophisticated functionality but don't natively integrate with most cloud-based or legal-centric software. These tools are built for different industries and use cases, not for legal teams.

Legal teams need the best OCR software that seamlessly connects to their contract management solutions to get scanned, photographed, or faxed documents processed and ready for redlines as soon as possible.

How is LinkSquares’ OCR Different?

LinkSquares has built the OCR solution that in-house legal teams need. Using cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) trained on thousands of legal documents, LinkSquares’ OCR engine automatically converts images into high-quality text that software (and humans) can read, edit, analyze, and organize. Plus, we have a team that QAs your documents and makes corrections if needed bringing accuracy to 99% – so you can perform a full-text search on any contract with confidence. 

LinkSquares' proprietary Smart OCR process provides 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 with the best OCR software, schedule a demo today.