Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Services

Optical Character Recognition is a service offered by Litigation Outsource that converts scanned documents into standard text files. In order for you to search for information on imaged documents, information has to be converted to searchable text. One conversion process involves the use of an OCR program to read the image and convert the information to text. This important step enables you to search all of your documents for key words or phrases, giving you a more efficient and powerful litigation database.

The potential of OCR systems is enormous because they enable users to harness the power of computers to access printed documents. OCR is already being used widely in the legal profession, where searches that once required hours or days can now be accomplished in a few seconds.

OCR involves the recognition and conversion of printed characters on an image (picture) to searchable ASCII text (similar to type in a word processing program). Recognition is impacted by the quality of the scanned page. Even on quality pages, OCR output may results only in 80% accuracy and will need to be edited. The OCR'd text files can be linked to the original image and provided to the client with links that provide a useful transition from text to image.

Litigation Outsource's staff of editors will clean up OCR'd text and run it through a QC process to verify data integrity. Edited documents will achieve 99.9% accuracy in database text retrieval.