The Truth About Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Welcome back to our series revealing the truth about contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions. With the help of some new friends, we're tackling common misconceptions about CLM solutions. Need to catch up? Head back to the first two installations of the series here and here. Otherwise, let’s talk about why having a human quality assurance (QA) of your Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is always a good idea. 

Myth #3: You don’t need a manual QA of your OCR process. 

What is OCR? OCR is the process of turning scanned documents or blurry pictures into readable, searchable text. That said, OCR technology isn’t perfect, so when it’s confronted with a poor-resolution scan, it can return unusable text. The only way to ensure that OCR accurately converts contract language to text is to bring in humans for quality assurance to plug the technology gaps.  

Why does this matter for legal teams? Legal pros need to be able to fully trust the contract information. While OCR technology has come a long way in recent years, there's still no substitute for a manual, human-lead QA process. Here’s why:

• Accuracy: Even the best OCR software is not 100% accurate. A manual QA process will help ensure that your documents are free of any scanning or recognition errors.
  
• Speed: Adding a manual QA process may take longer than relying solely on OCR, but it will save you time in the long run by ensuring that your documents are error-free from the start.
  
• Cost-effectiveness: If you’re going to pay for any service, you want the job done right the first time. Layering a manual QA process with the OCR process ensures just that your investment in technology is money well spent. 

LinkSquares offers top-of-the-line Smart OCR so you can easily read and search your contracts – even if they were rather illegible to begin with. To ensure mistakes don’t prevent you from extracting key data points, we layer on an extra level of human quality assurance to get the OCR as close to 100% accurate as possible. Performed by professionals trained in legal terminology, this system delivers accurate results every time so you can worry about the important stuff, and not if your “V’s” are inadvertently being converted to “W’s”.

Want to learn more about LinkSquares OCR? Request a demo today. 

We’re just about to wrap up the truth about CLM series! Join us next week for the grand finale to learn all about cloud-based editing tools.