PDF for Lawyers

When should you OCR documents? A quick primer.

Many people know that OCR stands for ‘optical character recognition,’ or if they don’t know that then they know that OCR is what you do to a scanned document to make it text-searchable. When you buy a new scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap it'll come with OCR software, and most people get the idea that they should OCR all documents that they scan. I don't recommend this, and don't know many "paperless experts" who recommend it.

First of all, even if your scanner comes with standalone OCR software you should just use the OCR function built into Acrobat. Each new version of Acrobat has improved on this OCR functionality, so just use Acrobat. It's always better to use one piece of software to do as many things as you can; it'll save you learning time and troubleshooting headaches.

Now when should you use Acrobat to do OCR?

To understand when to use OCR you need to appreciate a couple of things about OCRing documents. First, the process takes a couple of seconds for each page that you want to OCR. And by "a couple of seconds" I mean between 5 and 10 seconds, depending on your computer. That doesn't seem like much, but it is and here's why.

You can't scan in a new document while the last one is being OCR'd. So if you are scanning in your morning mail and you have 10 pieces of mail, you'd have to wait for each piece to be OCR'd before you could scan in the next one. Without doing OCR it might take you only 3 minutes to scan in those 10 pieces of mail (because you'll scan them in quickly and then go back and name them and file them after all the scanning is done). If you do OCR the process could take closer to 10 minutes.

True, you could scan in all the pieces and then batch OCR them, and this could be done while you were at lunch or having a coffee break. But, then we get to the next problem with OCRing documents: it makes the file-sizes a little bigger. Again, no big deal if you're talking about a few documents. But, over time you'll be talking about lots of documents, and that will chew up storage space.

But what about searchability? Isn't that the reason to OCR documents? And if you don't OCR the mail you scan then you won't be able to search it later, right?

Right, but the reality is that you won't be searching for mail very often, if ever, using text searching. Novices embarking on the paperless path have no idea what their tendencies will be so they are loathe to forego any option that might seem helpful. Experts know that the only documents that we tend to search (and which are therefore worth OCRing) are documents that are produced or received in a litigation case.

The mail and routine correspondence simply isn't worth the extra time (and extra file size) to justify OCRing.

When it comes to OCRing case documents you want to do a couple of things. First, you want to do the OCR as soon as possible after you've scanned them in. Create a copy of the file(s) you're going to OCR as backup first, in case something blows up. Second, learn to OCR one document at a time before you take up "batch processing."

Acrobat will probably prompt you to save your OCR'd document as new file with "OCR" appended to the file name. I don't keep two versions of documents if I can avoid it. So I just overwrite the old one with the OCR'd version (and if the new file is free from corruption or problems I delete my copy that I created as a backup).

Once you get comfortable with OCRing one document at a time, you'll want to learn to do "batch processing" so that you can OCR a folder full of documents. And you'll want to do this at night or when you'll be away from your computer for a long time. You'll need to babysit the first part of the process to respond to any initial prompts (but your prior experience will make you aware of how many prompts you'll receive, so you'll know when it's safe to leave).

In the past it was critical to OCR documents before attempting to bates-stamp them. In many versions of Acrobat that may still be true. I always OCR before bates-stamping as part of my workflow, and will continue to do this. I recommend you do the same to avoid any possible problems.

One last confession: I do sometimes OCR non-case documents, but only to solve a small annoyance. Sometimes the pages of a document that was scanned by someone else will be skewed to one side. I like my documents to be orderly and level, so I will run OCR on those documents to make them "straighten up."

For more posts on OCRing, click here.

Save Bates-stamp settings for future use

In the past we've [talked about how to bates-stamp](http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2011/09/the-8-page-guide-to-bates-stamping-in-acrobat-x.html) in Acrobat, and also how to set things up optimally. But once you've set up the optimal settings, it makes sense to save those settings. You can do that from the final dialogue box that appears when you're specifying where the bates-stamp will go. The screenshot below shows you that saving those settings is a simple two-step process: (1) click "Save Settings, and then (2) name the setting.

The 8 page guide to bates-stamping in Acrobat X

Here is an 8 page PDF that walks you through the steps you need to follow in order to bates-stamp a document (or documents) in Acrobat X. The PDF is made up of a series of screenshots so you can see exactly what you need to choose.

Bates-stamping in Acrobat is pretty easy once you've done it a couple of times, and it's usually a lot easier to do it yourself than to ask your paralegal. There are choices, and you should be the one to make them.

Adding bates-numbers in Acrobat is easy (and powerful)

It's easy to add bates-numbers to PDFs using Acrobat. If the documents you want to bates-stamp are not yet in PDF format, then you need to scan them or convert them to PDF. If you have Acrobat 8 or 9 simply follow these instructions, which begin by having you do this: choose Advanced > Document Processing > Bates Numbering > Add.

The instructions are the same in Acrobat X, except that you'll have to click on on the Tools menu over on the right, then >Pages > Bates Numbering > Add.

Once you've bates-numbered the documents you can search for documents based on the bates-number. Choose Edit > Search, and then as the search word or phrase, type in all or part of the Bates numbering that you want to find.

Pretty easy, isn't it? Makes you wonder why anyone would do it the old-fashioned way.

Bates-Stamping in Acrobat 9 Professional - Step-by-Step guide

Bates-stamping is incredibly useful for legal professionals. If you own the Professional version of Acrobat you can easily stamp a PDF document (or a batch of PDFs) with text, or sequential numbers. I put together a handy PDF guide that contains the step-by-step instructions for how to do this.

The guide won't help for Acrobat X Professional, because the initial steps are under different menus than the prior version. However, it should work for Acrobat 8 Professional. Remember, that Acrobat Standard does not have the bates-stamp feature.

Bates-stamping over several sessions - Should you do it this way?

Bates-stamping is important if you want to keep track of documents you produce. If you want to know how to do it, watch this video (go to the 13:00 mark for bates-stamping part). Bates-stamping is easy with Acrobat once you've done it a few times. And you should always bates-stamp documents that you're producing.

One common problem, though: you often don't get all of the documents that you need to produce at one time. Hence, you tend to have multiple productions. What happens then?

Well when you get the new documents, you will have already produced a range of documents that, let's say, ends in bates-number 1037. And so you'll be thinking you want to start this batch with bates-number 1038, right? Not necessarily.

If you want to keep the documents perfectly sequenced, then by all means start the next batch with number 1038. Acrobat will let you start your next bates-numbering sequence at any number you want. But, do you really have to do that? (Again, I'm not trying to convince you to alter your current method, just pointing out a workable option).

Let's say you don't care about being perfectly sequenced. How can you still make it so each document gets a unique bates-identifier? The answer is to change the prefix of the bates-identifier for each separate production. 

Here's an example of how you might have 4 separate productions, and label them slightly differently to accomplish this objective:

• HawkinsProd-01-[bates-range]
• HawkinsProd-02-[bates-range]
• HawkinsProd-03-[bates-range]
• HawkinsProd-04-[bates-range]

Obviously, you'd have duplicate numbers in the [bates-range] part of the idenfier. But, you'd still retain uniqueness of identifier based on the first part, "HawkinsProd-[diff #]."

In small cases this might make a lot of sense. Maybe you just want to quickly bates-stamp the new documents and produce them, without having to take the time to find the last bates number. Maybe you like keeping track of when the document was produced. 

Anyway, like I said, it's just something to consider. You can create a unique identifier in lots of ways, such as with a prefix or suffix. The bates-number doesn't have to be the only thing that makes the document unique. As long as you can keep track of your documents and have a unique letter/number to identify it with that's enough.