LOMA : Tech
Talk : Articles
Why We All
Hate Our Scanners: Is There An Answer?
By Ross L. Kodner
Scanning has been a
sore spot in law firms for many years. Why? Lawyers have viewed scanning
as being synonymous with optical character recognition (OCR). The
problem? Even with the best OCR products, results often fall short. Many
documents are not good “candidates” for recognition. Without a clean
laser-printed source document you’ll end up with gobbledygook. Your
staff will tell you it would have been faster to type the document than
to OCR it and have to clean up the resulting mess.
Instead, view scanning
as a way to turn physical paper into digital paper. This is like
photocopying the documents onto one’s computer screen. When scanning as
images, the process can be 20 times faster than the processing-intensive
OCR approach. Further, imaged documents on screen look PRECISELY like
the originals: handwriting, pre-printed lines / boxes: all scan
perfectly. This is a core part of the concept that I call the Paper LESS
Office(tm) (see
www.microlaw.com/cle/plessindex.html, also
LawCommerce.com’s Online CLE section).
What kind of scanner
should a firm deploy? What software should be used to scan, organize and
then search through the content of “digital paper?” Factors to consider:
(1) intended volume of documents to be scanned, (2) number of pages
scanned per job, (3) budget for internal scanning v. cost-effectiveness
of outsourced scanning. As to volume, read the specifications for duty
cycles. Buying a $100 scanner rated for 2,000 pages monthly when your
firm needs to scan 10,000 per month will surely smoke that “bargain”
scanner. The scanning marketing stratifies this way, roughly:
1) Entry-level flatbed
- usually flatbed scanners without automatic document feeders -
$50-$300. Unsuitable for law firm use because of cumbersome paper
handling.
1.5) Portable scanners
- Visioneer’s Strobe Pro weighs about 2 pounds. This
smaller-than-an-egg-carton-sized scanner can pull 10 imaged pages per
minute (ppm) into your computer system for $200. Antec’s Attache model
is a 12 oz. portable scanner which scans at 2-3 ppm. However, its
sub-$100 price and light weight appeals to mobile lawyers.
2) Entry-level
document-fed scanners - $250 - $600 flatbed scanners with automatic
document feeders. Suitable for lower volume scanning situations up to
15,000 pages monthly. Look at Visioneer’s 8650, models in
Hewlett-Packard’s Scanjet series and several from Microtek. Scanning
speeds: 4-8 ppm.
3) Lower Mid-range document-fed scanners -
$600 to $1300. Can feed 25-50 pages at speeds from 12-20 ppm Can handle up
to 50,000 pages a month. Leading products range from Visioneer’s 9650 at
12 ppm and 25 page feeder to the Fujitsu 3091/3092 series with 25-50 page
feeders and a speed of 15ppm.
4) Mid-range document-fed
scanners - The Fujitsu 93GX has been replaced by the 3093 series -
reliable workhorses. With a 27 ppm capacity, the 3093 series has a rugged
50-page feeder and fast SCSI interface. $1,800 to $2,400, depending on the
configuration.
Above this level, the sky
is the limit. Spend enough money and you’ll end up with a riding model
with a 12 hp engine and a pull-start! Well, almost…
Fujitsu, Panasonic, Bell
+ Howell, Canon, Ricoh, Kodak produce scanners that push the 100 ppm mark
with massive paper handling ability.
You now have these images
in your computer system; what’s next? Organizing and searching them.
Document management and work-product retrieval systems are the best
answer. These software systems can gently impose a file cabinet-like
consistency on the way any law practice organizes both its
internally-created documents as well as its externally received and
scanned documents. Worldox is the undisputed leader in the small firm
marketplace and has been digging into the larger firm segment for several
years with great success. For larger firms, iManage and PC DOCS are
popular. Elite, publisher of benchmark larger firm billing and accounting
products, has recently released their own document manager called
Encompass.
All document managers let
you organize and search scanned image files. This presumes, of course,
that the images are stored in a format that actually permits content
searching of what would otherwise be only a picture. Documents scanned
with Adobe Acrobat 5 or Adobe’s Capture systems are stored in the
universally viewable PDF format. PDF documents can now be “image over
text” documents. This means that if the software can recognize the
underlying text, it may be searchable by a document manager that has
PDF-search capabilities. Worldox excels at such a role as part of its
overall complement of document organization, management and retrieval
functions, but isn’t the only tool that can accomplish this.
Quick tip: a common
misconception is that if one scans at a higher resolution, the text
recognition results will improve. In fact, the opposite is often true -
lower scanner resolution settings can yield better recognition. At higher
resolutions, modern scanners can actually be “confused” by the fibers of
the paper. Set the resolution to 150 - 200 dpi for better text recognition
results.
