|
IMPROVE
YOUR LAW OFFICE WORK FLOW AND CUT YOUR LAW PRACTICE EXPENSES
WITH DIGITAL DOCUMENT PROCESSING-PAPER POWER FOR YOUR LAW PRACTICEWHY SHOULD YOU DO
THIS? If you haven’t already brought your practice into the digital age, you may well be asking “Exactly why should I do this?” Good question…here are just a few answers: · You’ll save money…on paper, printing, postage and storage space · You’ll save time – and time is money · In addition, you’ll streamline your collaboration. If you work with outside or contract lawyers or part time personnel, you’ll enhance your document preparation and processing. · You can avoid a major complaint of clients by keeping them informed of your activities on their matters · You can improve your filing system · You can take a whole case file…correspondence, pleadings and discovery…or all the transactional materials on the road with you for immediate use in your laptop or notebook computer And there’s so much more. Let’s find out how to tame that paper tiger… Philosophy and overview: The goal of this activity is to show you how easy it is to make your law practice more efficient and to do it on a budget. By using inexpensive “off the shelf” software and affordable hardware available at most large office supply stores, you’ll be on the “plug and play” way to immediate cost savings and improved efficiency. What do you need to do this? It’s really both simple and affordable. To get started, you’ll need: o A scanner, preferably with an automatic document feeder o Some really affordable software (some will even come included with your scanner), and o a CD burner for your computer, if you don’t already have one (about $40 - $50 installed) We’ll be discussing everything you need to accomplish these objectives in a “hands on, how to do it” fashion as this activity continues. What will this cost you? The last scanner I purchased ran $149 for an HP 5510 “all in one” unit. “All in one” means it included (1) a scanner; (2) a color ink jet printer; (3) a color copier, and (4) a fax machine. While the “all in one” machine including all the above sold for $149, it came with a $50 rebate, so my actual out the door price was really $99 for this small powerhouse. On my last trip to the big box store, I found comparable units by other manufacturers starting at $79. (parenthetical note: when I purchased my first color inkjet printer a few years ago, it ran over $400 and did only one thing…slowly…make color print-outs. The computer arena is one of the few fields where things get better and better and cheaper and cheaper every year. You almost can’t afford not to harness this technology.) In addition to your scanner, you’ll need some inexpensive software which we’ll be discussing. DOCUMENT
SCANNING: Document scanning is the process of taking a paper document such as a letter, a pleading, contract or other document and using your scanner as a sort of inverse photocopier to bring the paper document converted into digital form into your computer. Once you’ve got that document into your computer (it may run from 1 to 100 pages), the magic starts. Now, you can actually import the scanned document into your word processing program such as MS Word, Word Perfect, etc., then edit, correct, change and save it. Not only can you scan in then edit and save the document, but you can turn it into other forms such as a “pdf” (Portable Document Format, described later) then file, save, print or send it via email to others. Above, I mentioned my HP 5510 “All in One” scanner, and what makes it an “all in one” device…here’s a picture of that unit’s manual with a picture of it that I scanned into this activity so you can take a quick look at it:
A small picture of the unit appears in the upper left corner of the manual above. The picture of the manual cover is in the form of a digitized computer picture…it has not been translated into a form recognizable by your word processing program. The procedure of scanning in a document as a picture is the first step. The second step required to work on the document in your computer as a document involves the procedure referred to as Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. OPTICAL CHARACTER
RECOGNITION - OCR: “OCR” stands for Optical Character Recognition. This is the way we scan a document into our computer, then convert it and bring it into our computer’s word processing program. OCR process involves taking the scanned document which comes into your computer thru the scanner as a picture (analogous to putting a document into your photocopy machine and making a copy of it, which is also a picture) then converting or translating that picture into a text file, which you (or your secretary, paralegal or another attorney can then work on with your computer’s word processing program. If you still harbor any questions as to why you’d want to utilize this scan/OCR procedure, consider this scenario: if you have to respond to a motion from opposing counsel, in many situations you have to have your secretary type lengthy pleadings setting out the contents of the motion. Using OCR technology, you can simply scan in the whole motion, the “cut and paste” in the parts you need, eliminating the need to spend lots of expensive secretarial time re-typing extensive material. Why re-invent the wheel? Here’s what litigation attorney Roy Ching of the Merit Law Group in Silicon Valley has to say about an OCR program we’ll be discussing in more detail later: “ABBYY FineReader makes us
more efficient. It eliminates the need of having a secretary spend hours
re-typing long documents, when FineReader can convert them to a word
processing document in a matter of minutes or even
seconds.” Roy Ching That’s not the
only use for OCR that Mr. Ching employs. His firm also uses OCR to convert
discovery, motions, and pleadings to word processing documents, which can
then be “cut and
pasted”,
revised, reformatted, or incorporated into discovery responses, as well as
for communications with clients, opposing counsel or other parties, and in
pleadings and other documents. He also uses OCR
processing to digitize documents to provide the firm’s clients with
electronic copies of documents. This way, his firm can transmit documents
to clients and others faster, and enables the recipients of these digital
documents to store and access them easily. Here’s a quick picture
showing you the 3 steps of OCR: 1.
First,
you place the document on the scanner 2.
You
click the “Scan” or “Read” button... 3.
Then
you see the scanned text on your computer screen, ready to work
on.
In addition to your being
able to import then edit lengthy documents and pleadings, you’ll also
acquire the ability to create an electronic storage system for your files.
This will give you the advantages of electronically filing and storing
your documents, and you’ll save money by not having to pay rent for the
storage space for your closed and unused files. In addition, you’ll be
building a “forms library” of your past work-product, including both
documents and pleadings your office prepares, as well as those prepared
outside your practice by others. As Mr. Ching says. “It is much more
practical to retrieve a document with a few clicks of the mouse, rather
than to rummage through mountains of boxes in some dusty storage
room.” One of the OCR programs we’ll be discussing and using is FineReader Sprint 4.0, From Abbyy software. This program is the predecessor of their latest version 7, which currently retails for between about $300 to about $500. By using the 4.0 version, you can get started performing OCR in your office for well under $99, then you can always upgrade to the later (and more costly) version once you embrace this technology…and if you don’t, you get hurt financially. Here’s a quick product description about FineReader Sprint 4. From the supplier of the program: “Product Description The keenest
eye in Optical Character
Recognition! The following
picture shows you a typical screen in the Sprint Fine OCR program, showing
a scanned document imported for editing or working on with your word
processing program:
Now we’re actually going to perform some scanning and OCR procedures while you follow along as I do it, so you can see how easy and efficient it is to utilize this technology. This first picture shows the Abbyy Fine Reader OCR program open and ready to work
The picture above is of my desktop with the OCR program ready to start automatically capturing documents and translating them into Microsoft Word. The picture below shows the OCR program open, with the “Scanner” menu and the option to select the particular scanner you’ll use to import your documents into your word processing program. Here I’ve selected my HP scanner.
In the following picture, I’ve started the scan with the OCR program. The HP dialog box opens…
Here you see the results as the scanner has imported the document. In this particular example, I’m using a one page document as a streamlined illustration. In actual application in your office, you may be scanning in a document of several pages. As this scanner has a sheet feeder and because this OCR program supports multiple page documents, the process of performing OCR on a multi-page document is automatic.
In this illustration, the document is scanning into the computer as the status bar moves across the box
This alert box has popped up, telling us that for best results, we should set the resolution of our scanner to not less than 300 dpi (Dots Per Inch) in the OCR program. I’m going to ignore that, and we’ll see what we get at a 200 dpi, a lower resolution.
The following picture shows the document imported into the OCR program:
We’ve performed the OCR operation, and here’s the document ready to save into our word processing program:
The following picture shows us ready to save the OCR’d document into our word processing program in RTF (Rich Text File) format. This rtf format can be used by just about all popular word processing programs.
Should you need help during your OCR operation, it’s available. This illustration shows the contents section of the OCR’s help file.
This picture shows the Microsoft Word word processing program open, with our newly OCR’d document open on the screen. Here, we can edit, revise and save it as we would any other document. The difference is we’ve harnessed the power of OCR and our scanner to “read” the document into our computer. Imagine the secretarial time you’d save using your OCR to import a 25 page pleading.
In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to spell check…but here, the illustration shows running the MS Word spell check on the OCR’d document. In the picture, “HIPAA” is not spelled incorrectly, it’s just a word not recognized by the spell check feature. Once I select the “Add" option, this word won’t be flagged in future spell check operations.
In this picture, we’re ready to save the document as a “regular” .doc Word file.
Once you adopt OCR in your office, you’ll be able to quickly scan and perform OCR on most all documents. This particular OCR program will scan multi-column documents and retain the columnar format You’ll also be able to scan and OCR correspondence and even more valuable, pleadings. The next time you see that “killer motion” with great citations you just must have, instead of using hours of secretarial time, you can just pop it into your scanner’s document feeder, fire up your OCR program and bring it into your word processing program in minutes…instead of the hours previously required. Computer-Based
Dictation And Automated Transcription: Do you perform your dictation using a dictation machine from which your work product needs to be transcribed and typed into your word processing program? What if you could eliminate the step of transcription and manual typing into your word processor? Think of the savings in secretarial time you’d realize…and time IS money. Well, now you can do this…you can actually use your computer as a mechanical secretary and bring your dictation right into your word processing program. The computerized dictation programs available allow you to dictate right into your PC…where your words are captured right into your word processing program, ready for editing and proofing. You won’t have to use the computer keyboard…just a microphone…and as you speak your words (most of them, anyway) will appear right on the blank page of your word processing program. What does this mean to you? Simply put, you’ll be able to eliminate much of the costly and time consuming work of having your secretary keyboard your dictation in to your computer. Using this procedure, while you dictate, your spoken words are captured by your computer then “translated” right into your word processing program. Of course, your work product will still need some proof reading and editing, but it would even without computerizing your dicataion, and just think of the time – and money represented by secretarial time - you’ll save. Here’s a screen shot of the program I use…”Talk it – Type it”. Notice the green program status bar across the top of my desktop:
My computer dictation program “Talk it-Type it” is open and running, and it’s green status bar is displayed across the top of my computer desktop. This is an actual picure of my computer screen. The horizontal green bar across the top of the screen is the computer dictation program status bar. The following picture is a shot from the dictation program’s “help” menu.
The following screen capture pictures illustrate actual computer dictation into the program:
I’ve just spoken the following into the microphone: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.” Of course, the computerized dictation is not 100% accurate. In the following picture you’ll see some of the errors that require proof-reading as the dictation continues:
The above shows bolded dictation into the program
This picture shows the procedure of running the MS Word’s spell check function. You will get errors when you perform computerized speech to text dictation, but even the best legal secretary will make errors too. The significant fact here is that computerized dictation will do the following for you: ü You’ll eliminate the extra step of having your dictation transcribed and manually typed into your word processing program. ü As you dictate, your speech is automatically brought into your word processing program. ü You’ll have to proof and edit your “computer-transcribed” dictation…but you’d have to do that anyway. ü You’ll save a ton of money you’d otherwise pay your secretary or an outside service to do transcription for you! You won’t be able to get rid of your secretary, and hopefully your secretary’s so busy on other tasks you couldn’t anyway, but you’ll certainly cut down time spent in the tedious (and expensive) chore of manually typing in your dictation. If you do any typing work of your own, you’ll save your own time, too. By the way, you don’t need to be a Microsoft Word user to enjoy the benefits of computerized dictation Are you wondering how much it will cost to harness the power of your computer to speed up your workflow by adding computerized dictation to your practice? Two of the “higher end” computer dictation programs include “Dragon Naturally Speaking Legal” and IBM’s “ViaVoice” pictured below.
Dragon Naturally Speaking Legal retails for MSRP $1,095…available online for around $895, and ViaVoice is less expensive, you can pick it up for about $200, but when you complete this activity, discover how you’ll be able to try computerized dictation for considerably less through a special bonus offer. My personal choice for computer dictation is “Talk it Type it” which is both effective and very affordable. By the way, you don’t have to be a MS Word user to get started with computer dictation. The program I use (and most other computer dictation programs too) works with the following (according to it’s manufacturer), here’s what they say: “Works With
And you don’t need a
power-house computer to start your own computerized dictation. Here’s what
the manufacturer of “Talk it Type it” requires to run their
program: “System
Requirements That’s a pretty basic system. I started
out using it on an older Pentium with Windows 98…if you’ve got that or
newer, you’ll be able to harness the time and money saving benefits of
computerized dictation too. Converting Your
Documents To “Pdf” Format
The final topic on our agenda for this activity is converting your documents to “pdf format”. “Pdf” stands for “Portable Document Format”. Originated by Adobe and as popularly used in their Adobe Acrobat program, pdf documents offer you a number of advantages once you have a document on your computer. You may not want your documents to be able to be changed, edited, re-used or modified, and the pdf format can help you accomplish this. You can make just about any document that can be created in your computer word processing program or viewed on your computer (and others, too) or even brought into your computer as a scan, into pdf documents. Some examples include:
Pdf documents can be viewed on computer, printed out, and because of their small file size can be readily sent as email attachments. One particular advantage of the pdf format is it’s platform independent. That means if you create a pdf file on a Windows computer using a particuilar word processing program then convert it to a pdf file, it can be viewed by Apple/Mac users and other PC users on different operating platforms who don’t have access to the same program you created the document with. So while making your documents into pdf files gives you the ability to share them with others using different computers and operating systems independent of having to have access to the same program you created the documents with, there is a small downside…the users have to either have Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Acrobat reader, which is distributed free by Adobe. By the way, if you don’t have the Adobe Acrobat Reader,
you can get it free by clicking here with your computer connected to the
internet: CLICK
HERE
TO DOWNLOAD THE FREE ADOBE ACROBAT READER from the Adobe
Website. Once you have the free Adobe Reader (if you don’t already have it) you’ll be able to view, read and print pdf documents. You can also secure pdf documents so that a password is required to view them, and you can add certain other security features to the document which we’ll be discussing. Let’s take a quick look at converting a Windows-based MS Word document into a platform independent pdf document. There are several different methods you can use. I have not only Adobe Acrobat, but also a number of other helper programs to convert documents into pdf files. As a user of this activity, you’ll also have access to tools to quickly and easily convert your documents into the pdf format too. Here’s a screen shot of Adobe Acrobat:
The following picture shows a MS Word document (a 75 page document) open which we’re going to convert from a “.doc” format into a pdf format.
Using Adobe’s MS Word “Distiller” plug-in, we’re going to convert the above Word document into a pdf file. See the notations in the picture below for what’s going on. (The “Distiller” is a plug-in, or helper program that works inside Word to convert a Word document into the Adobe PDF format quickly and easily). In this picture, we’re ready to convert the document into a pdf file, using the “distiller” plug-in to perform the conversion quickly and automatically.
In the above picture, all we have to do to make our PDF file is simply click on the “Save” button in the bottom middle of the picture. We’ve clicked “Save” as a PDF file, and our document has been converted to the Adobe Portable Document Format. Just to double check, we now have our Adobe Acrobat program open in the picture below, and we’re ready to open the new PDF file just to make sure everything went as planned…
 
In the above illustration, we’ve closed Word and opened our Adobe Acrobat program; as you can see, the former Word document now has been converted into a pdf file, and is ready to open in Acrobat, if we wish to do so. One click on the “Save” button above and our 75 page word processor document has been instantly converted into a pdf file. Just to reassure you, as you see in the picture below, after saving our pdf file, we now have 2 files…the original Word file (.doc) and the new pdf file:
In the illustration above, the file on the left is the PDF file; the file on the right is the original MS Word document. Both have been saved on our hard drive, and we can work with either or both files, depending on our goals, and for further work in the office, we can edit and revise either with the appropriate program. The picture below shows the new PDF file open in Adobe Acrobat…another successful conversion!
The above picture, the converted Word document, now converted to the PDF format, has been opened as a PDF in Adobe Acrobat. The result is we’ve now got two similar documents:
We can use either or both formats, depending on our wishes. Just in case you’re wondering “Why would I want two duplicate documents, one as a word processor document, and the second as a pdf file?” here are only some of a number of reasons: ü
PDF files are often smaller than native word processing
document files; ü
Many recipients fear receiving a “doc” file by email
because of virus threats; ü
The changes or revisions detectable in a word processing
file cannot be seen in a pdf; ü
You can protect a pdf file from printing, changing or
editing ü Users of any computer or operating system have access to pdf files…they don’t have to have the same word processor you used to make it to view it What else can we do with Adobe Acrobat? Well, for one, we can use it to scan in documents directly to the pdf format (we discussed scanning and OCR above). By using Acrobat to scan a document, we eliminate the additional step of OCR should we desire to work on a PDF format. The picture below shows Adobe Acrobat open and ready to scan in a document as a pdf file:
When we use Acrobat to scan in a document with our scanner, we can import the document immediately as a PDF and we don’t have to convert it This can be a handy feature when we want to take a document that’s not yet on our computer and immediately make a PDF file from it. In other circumstances, we may wish to scan the document in and work on it with our word processing program without first converting it to a PDF. In such cases, we’d perform the scan and OCR as discussed above. The final point on making your word processor documents into PDF files, or bringing them into your computer as PDF’s using your scanner is…”What will this cost me?”. You can get the latest version of Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard for about $300.00 – the enhanced “professional” version will set you back about $449 from Adobe, however as a user of this program, you’ll be able to get your PDF tools for much (“seriously much”) less! CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO MAIN MENU / TABLE OF CONTENTS
|
