Businesses generate documentation and data at a rapid pace, both on and offline. Industries like banking and the financial sector regularly manage thousands of different types of documents. Keeping up with this cumulative documentation can be difficult and costly. A digitized, paperless business can mean an increasing organization, work efficiency and more accurate data.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology offers the opportunity for businesses to get a better handle on their information.

What is OCR? 

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) refers to the technology that converts written characters, or handwritten text and numbers, into digital data. With OCR, businesses can digitize, store and manage all of their documentation in readable and searchable digital format.

OCR is more sophisticated than simply scanning, where documents are simply recorded as a copied image. OCR recognizes individual letters, characters and numbers, converting them into documents that can be manipulated, edited and searched.

The benefits of modern OCR are applicable across many sectors, often running in the background fulfilling a supporting function. It might not always be customer-facing but OCR facilitates many everyday practices. OCR makes digital files more dynamic and usable and it is highly beneficial to modern businesses with regard to eDiscovery. OCR has massive potential for time saving, cost saving and ensuring your business is properly prepared in case of a litigation process. 

The History of OCR 

The first OCR technology appeared 100 years ago, with the invention of the Optophone, a reading device for the blind that translated letters into sounds, facilitating understanding and communication. In the 1990s, OCR became more popular, as it facilitated the digitization of newspapers. Later, in the early 2000s, OCR became a cloud-based service and could be accessed on desktop and mobile devices.

OCR evolved rapidly throughout the years, and modern OCR software is far more advanced, providing results close to perfection in terms of accurate recognition and conversion of documents. An example of modern OCR is the Google Translate app, which allows you to point your smartphone to a document or sign and see it translated in real time.

How Does OCR Technology Work?

The OCR process can be divided into three distinct stages: image pre-processing, character recognition, and post-processing of the output.

1. First, the document is scanned, prepared, and the image is converted into black and white to facilitate better recognition.
2. Next, it is time for the software to identify the characters. This is achieved in a number of different ways. The most basic forms of OCR match the pixels into an existing font database, while the most sophisticated forms of OCR break down each character into constituent elements, such as curves or corners, to match physical features and actual letters. The software can even use a dictionary and AI technology to ensure a high level of accuracy.
3. Finally, a digital text file is produced and converted into searchable documentation.

Which Industries Use OCR Technology?

Banks, law firms, insurance, healthcare, and tourism are major industries that use OCR to scale their services and improve customer experience. A number of different types of business processes are automated by OCR and supporting technologies. The ability to digitize and convert a paper document or image into a digital format saves companies time and streamlines their workflow.

The video below by Techquickie provides an excellent overview of the definition, evolution and main uses of OCR in businesses.

OCR & Social Media

Due to the relevance of social media in litigation, companies need to implement a proper system to ensure all its relevant online data is properly preserved. Discoverable information could be stored on the user’s social media accounts so organizations need to consider chat and social media platforms as crucial sources of ESI. 

Thanks to OCR, social media eDiscovery does not need to represent a problem for companies. With the power of OCR, solutions like WebPreserver allow businesses to export in a range of fully searchable formats.

You are able to capture a social media timeline, posts, web pages, comments, images, etc and export all these data as a searchable OCR PDF. This kind of approach speeds up eDiscovery processes: accurate evidence can be located with increased precision.

Benefits of OCR in eDiscovery and Online Investigations

Considering all its uses and benefits, OCR represents a great opportunity for eDiscovery and online investigations.

1. Securing important documents and data

With OCR, paper documents are converted into electronically stored information (ESI). ESI is easily protected and can be edited, copied, and distributed at will. Paper-based documentation is much more vulnerable to damage or destruction. Digitization helps to ensure your information is more secure.

2. Easily locating electronically stored information

Businesses have an obligation to produce ESI as requested. As OCR can rapidly convert images or any paper-based documentation into searchable and readable digital files, the technology allows companies to speed up the process of locating specific pieces of information. Simply scanning documents would not provide the same functionality that OCR provides.

3. Reducing human error

OCR also reduces the margin for human error by removing the need for the manual review of masses of paper documents. Although the process is not entirely infallible, modern OCR gives a much better degree of accuracy, and helps businesses scale their processes of document archiving.

4. Improving information governance

This process not only avoids mistakes, but it allows you to categorize and search digitized information by keywords, names, dates, etc. — allowing for better information governance.

It is important to note that OCR processing can take time, especially if you have a large volume of data. In this case, companies must ensure that they have a process in place to ensure that OCR is applied to all their documents as standard practice, before they are needed, for example, as the result of a legal hold.

5. Reducing eDiscovery costs

This streamlining of the search process carries the potential to drastically reduce the associated costs of eDiscovery. OCR processes can also reduce the manual work of handling legal documents (which can also be time-consuming and costly.)

6. Searching images for text

OCR enables businesses to identify text in images. For example, when an image is scanned and interpreted with OCR, the text contained within it becomes searchable. The software has its own way of scanning files so that it recognizes the specific characters and spaces on the document. That means that you can search for keywords throughout your image files, just like any other document. 

7. Searching videos for text

Another great feature of OCR technology is the ability to make video captions searchable. It facilitates and saves so much time in cases where long videos (for example, witness statements or testimonials) need to be searched for key phrases or conversations. OCR is great for pinpointing exactly who said what and when. Captions are easily generated, but OCR can take things a step further by rendering the visual output of the captioning into a fully searchable text document.

8. Accurate translation

OCR is also very effective when it comes to translation. The more advanced OCR systems have their own dictionaries and are programmed to understand how words and sentences are properly constructed. This ensures the right language and grammar in terms of clarity and correctness. This way, you can make sure your document is digitized accurately and free from errors. 

Why Do Legal Documents Need to Be Searchable?

OCR automates the process of digitizing images or paper documents, which can have a transformative effect on the way that information is preserved. Paper-based discovery is replaced by searchable digital data, such as a PDF file or Word document. But what makes search-ability in legal documents so important? 

• Court requirements: Most courts require text to be searchable. During an investigation, they can check if you used OCR software once your documents are eFiled. 
• Time and cost savings: The manual effort of digitizing a high volume of paper discovery is not only time consuming, but expensive. With OCR businesses save time and budget. 
• Higher accuracy: OCR minimizes errors, such as typos, grammar mistakes and incorrect sentence structure giving an accurate replication. 
• Managing handwritten discovery: Many legal notes and paper discovery are handwritten and OCR software is able to process and digitalize those documents. 
• Easy access to files: OCR facilitates the ability to quickly search for and locate individual words within large files. When you need to work at speed or pinpoint an incredibly specific section of text, this speed and access is a game-changer.

How To Implement & Benefit From OCR

There are a number of different ways that OCR can be integrated into your business. 

• Built-in OCR Software: Some scanners come with built-in proprietary OCR software, so you can make sure your documents are searchable as soon as they are scanned. 
• Third-party OCR software: It is possible to implement stand-alone, third-party OCR software and install it on your teams’ computers. This can be very effective, but your employees need to remember to apply OCR consistently to any paper-based documentation they generate. 
• Integrated OCR software: You can use a document management system with integrated, automatic OCR. This type of implementation allows you to store, organize, manage, and automatically apply OCR to all your documents. 

Regardless of the type of implementation you prefer, some form of OCR is essential to the production of searchable digitized documents. 

OCR technology is truly revolutionary when it comes to searchable documents. You get better outcomes for justice with fuller access to evidence. Without OCR, it would be very difficult to extract fine detail from the same quantities of analog data and crucial evidence might have been missed or overlooked.