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A product to automatically search unsearchable files

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: October 19, 2018

It is very possible that up to a third of the documents that a law firm has stored is unsearchable—or even unfindable. And some day, you’re going to need to find and search some of those.

What’s unsearchable? Image-based documents like faxes, scanned documents like PDF’s and TIFF’s and more. What’s unfindable? Email attachments, old bills, legacy documents in old formats and more.

Well, there is a product on the market that says it can find the unfindable and search the unsearchable. It’s called Symphony OCR by workflow company Trumpet. (Note: This looks like a cool product, but I haven’t tested it).

OCR (optical character reader) products take images and convert them into searchable documents but they all work in different levels and with different effectiveness. What takes this product seemingly to the next level is that it can do everything that needs to be done with this data automatically and in the background. This is different from most OCR products, which can only look through and convert one file at a time, and then only files you know about.

It can find the documents and images that can’t be found by ordinary search algorithms. It can find files that can’t be found because nobody looks for it or knows to look for it. It can then convert those files into searchable documents and it can then search those documents by key word. Then it can save the newfound documents without affecting the old formats. Ands it gives you control over the process every step of the way.

Symphony OCR works into the future, too. Once installed, the product works in the background to automatically convert every new document or image into a searchable document.

Symphony OCR also integrates with virtually every document management system used by attorneys.

Symphony’s website does not list the cost of the product but it does offer a free tool to go through your database and find these unfindable and unsearchable files.

The company also has a number of other products of use to attorneys, including one called Signature Bridge, which automatically tracks signatures between NetDocuments and DocuSign, which could be useful.

Check out Symphony OCR here: https://trumpetinc.com/products/symphony-ocr.


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