Technical FAQs

Effective document management is now a top priority for organizations, but for many, it remains a challenge. As noted by recent AIIM survey data, companies are struggling to handle both the documents they have and the rapid uptake of new information. In fact, 43 percent said their biggest priority is effectively leveraging the structured and unstructured content they already have, while 57 percent are focused on understanding the overwhelming big data.  Optical character recognition (OCR) is a critical component of document management.

For software development firms, this poses a particular challenge. Products are no longer feature complete without critical end-user functions such as advanced optical character recognition and powerful search. However, adding this functionality is not as easy as it sounds. Developers building out this comprehensive construct from the ground up requires both time, effort, and continued maintenance, which is a large undertaking for any company.

Accusoft’s ImageGear SDK offers a way to bridge the OCR gap with comprehensive image processing and manipulation capabilities that both streamline software development and deliver on end-user expectations.*

What is ImageGear?

ImageGear easily integrates into existing applications to deliver cutting-edge document management functionality at scale. Available for both .NET and C/C++ frameworks, ImageGear allows developers to quickly deploy and white-label key features including image processing, manipulation, conversion, and PDF and document search.

This add-on OCR functionality delivers highly-accurate optical character recognition to any .NET (C#) or C/C++ application. ImageGear’s OCR add-on provides full-page character recognition for more than 100 languages — including both Western and Asian languages such as Korean, Japanese, and Chinese character sets. It’s capable of recognizing multiple languages within a single image for enhanced document management. Other OCR features include:

• Automatic page segmentation into individual zones for processing
• Type assignment per zone based on defined flows, tables, or graphics
• Table detection with advanced technology to enhance data reconstruction output
• Entire page or individual region image processing
• Zone definition by user, existing files, or detected automatically by the OCR engine

In addition, software developers can enhance ImageGear OCR functionality by leveraging both predefined and customizable dictionaries to ensure validated results using regular expressions. 

Why Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Matters to End-Users

Advanced OCR integration makes it easier for end-users to find what they’re looking for, when they’re looking for it. Instead of forcing users to find additional apps that deliver specific services, in-app OCR delivers increased satisfaction by streamlining user search functionality.

Common use cases include:

• Legal eDiscovery — The eDiscovery process is a critical — and often complex — stage of legal case preparation. Firms need to quickly find key terms, phrases, and images within legal documents to ensure they meet both client expectations and compliance obligations. With many forms now scanned and stored in non-standard file formats that contain form fields, text boxes, and digital imagery, OCR is essential to help lawyers streamline the process of eDiscovery at scale.

• Financial Document Processing — Clients now expect loan applications and credit card applications to be processed at scale and speed. This is especially critical as firms embrace the idea of remote work — both staff at home and those in the office need end-to-end OCR functionality to deliver complete document management.

• Insurance Documentation Assessment — Insurance claims are both complex and comprehensive, requiring complete documentation from clients, contractors, and compliance agencies. As insurance firms move to tech-first frameworks to enhance document processing, speed, and accuracy, OCR makes it easy for staff to find specific data and ensure documentation is complete. 

Integrating OCR

Advanced OCR functionality won’t deliver expected outcomes if integration is cumbersome and complex. ImageGear streamlines this process with easy SDK implementation for both .NET and C/C++.

ImageGear .NET can be easily deployed on multiple platforms. These .NET deployments include ASP.NET functions such as image display, thumbnail display, annotation support, and cloud capture along with WPF printing and annotation support. ImageGear for C/C++, meanwhile, offers support for several platforms as well. Check out the developer resources section to see an updated list.

How Your Clients Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

PDFs remain the go-to file format for many industries, offering both standardized image and text conversion along with the ability to easily set or restrict document permissions. The problem? PDFs are notoriously difficult to search, making it hard for end-users to quickly find the text or data they need.

ImageGear makes it easy to OCR PDFs using the ImGearRecPage.Recognize Method, which leverages the zone list of the image to deliver accurate OCR — or, if this list is empty, automatically calls the page-layout decomposition process (auto-zoning) to complete the OCR process.

C# supports OCR to PDF.

using System.IO;
using ImageGear.Core;
using ImageGear.Formats;
using ImageGear.Evaluation;
using ImageGear.Recognition;

namespace ImageGearTest
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Initialize evaluation license.
            ImGearEvaluationManager.Initialize();
            ImGearEvaluationManager.Mode = ImGearEvaluationMode.Watermark;

            // Initialize the Recognition Engine.
            ImGearRecognition igRecognition = new ImGearRecognition();

            // ImageGear assemblies require explicit initialization at application startup.
            ImGearCommonFormats.Initialize();

            // Open a FileStream for our output document.
            using (FileStream outputStream = new FileStream(@"c:\temp\outputDoc.txt", FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.ReadWrite))
            {
                // Open a FileStream for our source multi-page image.
                using (FileStream multiPageDocument = new FileStream(@"c:\temp\test.tif", FileMode.Open))
                {

                    // Load every page of the multi-page document. Starting at page 0 and loading the range of spaces specified.    
                    // Since the range is -1, that specifies that all pages shall be loaded.     
                    ImGearDocument doc = ImGearFileFormats.LoadDocument(multiPageDocument, 0, -1);

                    // Determine the amount of pages in the multi-page image.
                    int numPages = ImGearFileFormats.GetPageCount(multiPageDocument, ImGearFormats.UNKNOWN);

                    // Recognize each page of the multi-page document and add the results to outputStream.
                    for (int pageNumber = 0; pageNumber < numPages; pageNumber++)
                    {

                        // Cast the current page to a raster page and import that page.
                        using (ImGearRecPage igRecPage = igRecognition.ImportPage((ImGearRasterPage)doc.Pages[pageNumber]))
                        {

                            // Preprocess the page.
                            igRecPage.Image.Preprocess();

                            // Perform recognition.
                            igRecPage.Recognize();

                            // Add OCR results to the outputStream.
                            igRecognition.OutputManager.WriteDirectText(igRecPage, outputStream);

                        }
                    }
                }

            }
            // Dispose of objects we are no longer using.
            igRecognition.Dispose();
        }
    }
}

OCR Access and Analysis

Advanced OCR isn’t enough in isolation — developers must also empower end-users to quickly access and analyze OCR output. ImageGear offers multiple options to help streamline this process, such as:

• Storage of Output as Code Pages
• Export to Text Format
• Export to PDF
• Export to MRC PDF
• Export to a Formatted Document

Find Your Best Fit

ImageGear OCR makes it easy for end-users to quickly search critical documents, find the data they need, and analyze optical character recognition output, but don’t take our word for it. Seeing is believing. Test ImageGear in your own environment and discover the difference of advanced OCR. 

*Optical character recognition is an ImageGear add-on and must be requested upon purchase of a license.

Although often considered a bit old fashioned, the insurance industry has made great strides in recent years to adapt to the changing needs of its customers. The latest generation of insurance customers expects faster service, better support, and more options from providers. Given these pressures, it’s no surprise that InsurTech developers have found ample opportunities to deliver solutions that help insurance firms better manage their workflows and create better customer experiences.

Despite the successes of this digital transformation, however, there are still a number of challenges that InsurTech developers face when building new applications. Investing heavily in creating powerful AI and big data tools might help those platforms stand out from the crowd, but they won’t find much success with firms if they don’t also provide the core functionality organizations need to service their customers. 

That’s why many InsurTech developers are turning to versatile SDK and API integrations to expand their feature sets without compromising their development timelines.

4 Major Challenges of InsurTech Applications

1. Security and Privacy

As the insurance industry continues to shift toward digital processes and platforms, it’s become more important than ever for InsurTech applications to keep sensitive data secure. While most organizations do invest in cybersecurity protections, they often don’t realize how their own practices could potentially pose a risk to customer information. This is especially true of insurers that rely on third-party programs for various tasks like document viewing and editing. Take, for instance, the case of Folksam Group, which inadvertently shared client data from as many as one million customers with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Adobe in late 2020. 

2. File Management

Today’s insurers are receiving all kinds of documents, files, and images from their customers, which creates something of a document dilemma. A single auto accident claim, for instance, might have valuable information spread across multiple PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheet files, scanned images of hand-written forms, and image files. In order to process claims quickly and effectively, firms need InsurTech solutions that provide an all-in-one solution that can handle a broad array of file formats. Without these file management tools, insurers will be forced to use multiple programs to meet their needs, which creates inefficient dependencies and increases security risks.

3. Data Collection

Insurance companies gather quite a bit of information from form applications, both in physical and digital formats. Unfortunately, transferring that information from a form document into an InsurTech system is often a laborious manual process. Not only is manual data collection time consuming, it also increases the likelihood of human error. Even when firms do implement an InsurTech solution with forms processing capabilities, however, they often lack the capability to read certain types of form fields, especially those completed by hand. The ability to adapt to new form templates is also critical for organizations that want to invest in automation. 

4. Remote Collaboration

The COVID-19 pandemic may have forced insurance offices to rapidly embrace a remote work strategy, but many firms had already been investing in some form of hybrid work model for years. Nationwide was able to transition 98 percent of its workforce to remote status precisely because the company already had the technology solutions in place to allow insurance agents to work from home. Without some way of facilitating remote collaboration directly through InsurTech applications, organizations end up relying on email, which poses serious security concerns. Furthermore, with multiple copies of a document being distributed and downloaded, it quickly becomes difficult to know which version incorporates the most up-to-date changes.

SDK and API InsurTech Solutions

Building new functionality into an application always involves a tradeoff. When developers choose to code something from scratch, that means pulling team members away from another project or extending the product’s release timeline. In a fast-moving industry where InsurTech developers are racing competitors to be the first to market, it doesn’t make sense to design and build every aspect of an application in-house. 

Rather than pulling valuable development resources away from their innovative InsurTech features, developers can solve common insurance challenges much faster with SDK toolkits and API integrations. 

Secure File Viewing

The easiest way for InsurTech solutions to keep documents secure is to integrate HTML5 viewing capabilities directly into the application. Rather than being forced to download or open a file for viewing in a third-party application, employees can view multiple document formats natively. This is critical because it means no data will be shared with third-party programs.  Since the files remain safely within the secure InsurTech environment, firms can also control the level of access to any document, which prevents unauthorized individuals from downloading or viewing the contents. Thanks to API-based integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer, InsurTech developers can help their applications safely view more than 100 unique file types without any third-party dependencies.

Data Capture

By integrating forms processing capabilities into their applications, InsurTech developers can provide their clients with powerful tools that allow them to gather essential data quickly and accurately. As the essential connective tissue between customers and insurance databases, form field recognition integrations use OCR technology to intelligently identify form data and extract it for processing. They can also be set up to identify a wide range of insurance forms to quickly identify and scan documents to streamline processing workflows. Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms even goes a step further by incorporating powerful image cleanup functionality to ensure that data will be extracted as accurately as possible.

File Conversion

In order to meet the file management challenges of today’s insurance providers, InsurTech developers need document and image processing integrations that can read and write multiple file formats. Information spread across multiple documents, emails, or even texts can be processed using OCR technology, and then consolidated and converted into a variety of formats for easy reference and collaboration. Rather than juggling several files with different dependencies, an SDK integration like Accusoft’s ImageGear can easily output processed files in PDF, RTF, XML, or DOCX format for viewing and editing within a single application.

Editing and Annotation

Providing secure document viewing capabilities solves only one half of the insurance collaboration challenge. InsurTech applications also need to provide both internal and external stakeholders with the ability to edit and markup documents throughout the application and claims process. Content processing integrations can allow authorized users to make changes to documents completely within their InsurTech solution and review markups and comments from other collaborators. 

Since all editing occurs within the application itself, there’s no need to worry about anyone downloading a document to make changes locally and creating confusion over which version is the most up-to-date. Redactions may also be necessary to hide private or confidential information from unauthorized viewers. As an added benefit, PrizmDoc Viewer’s editing features allow users to make a variety of markups and redactions while preserving the integrity of the original file.

Accelerate Your InsurTech Application Development with Accusoft

Accusoft’s collection of powerful SDK toolkits and API integrations provide innovative InsurTech developers with the resources they need to solve core insurance industry challenges. By implementing proven functionality into their applications, project managers can streamline the development process and dedicate more resources to the innovative features that will set their platform apart from the competition.

Whether you’re looking to incorporate versatile document viewing and editing or need a more accurate forms processing solution, Accusoft’s family of InsurTech SDKs and APIs can help your development team get to market faster. Learn more about what our products can do for your application in our InsurTech fact sheet.

KnowledgeLake had long utilized an in-house viewing solution that allowed customers to view documents within the platform. Although this legacy viewer had gone through many iterations over the years, it was deployed as part of an on-prem solution. When KnowledgeLake transitioned its on-premise products to a cloud-based solution, they decided to evaluate Accusoft’s PrizmDoc as an alternative to their in-house viewing solution.

Implementing specialized viewing technology saves time and resources during the development process so FinTechs can get their products to market faster. By selecting the right integration partner from the beginning, they can put themselves in a position to scale capabilities in the future without suffering unexpected costs or compromising performance. 

Viewing Integrations and the Problem of Scale

FinTech developers often turn to API-based viewing integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc because they provide the tremendous power and flexibility that modern financial services applications require. Whether it’s file conversion, robust annotation, document assembly, or redaction, FinTech software must be able to provide extensive document processing features to meet customer expectations.  

In order to implement those advanced viewing capabilities, the developer usually needs to set up a dedicated server as part of their on-premises infrastructure or in a cloud deployment. One of the biggest advantages of API-based integrations is that customers only have to pay for the processing resources they use, but this can also pose some challenges when it comes to scaling application capacity. 

As FinTech companies expand their services, they need to be able to deliver document viewing capabilities to a larger number of users. If each viewing session requires the server to prepare and render documents for viewing, costs can quickly escalate. As server workloads increase, viewing responsiveness may be affected, resulting in delays and slower performance. 

While some users may still need to use server-based viewing to access more powerful imaging and conversion features, many customers simply need a quick and easy way to view and make minor document alterations. FinTech developers need a versatile solution that can meet both requirements if they want to scale their services smoothly. 

Introducing PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing

PrizmDoc’s new Hybrid Viewing feature provides FinTech applications the best of both worlds by offloading the document processing workloads required for viewing to client-side devices. Rather than using server resources to convert files into SVG format and render them for display, Hybrid Viewing instead converts files into PDF format and then delivers that document to the end user’s browser for viewing.  

Shifting the bulk of document processing work to client-side devices significantly reduces server workloads, which translates into lower costs for FinTech applications. 

For documents not already in PDF format, the PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing feature offers new PDF viewing packages that pre-convert documents into PDF for fast, responsive local viewing. 

By reducing the server requirements for rendering files, FinTech providers can easily scale their applications without worrying about additional users increasing their document processing costs. PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing also eliminates the need for separate viewing solutions implemented to work around server-based viewing, which allows developers to streamline their tech stack and further optimize customer experiences. 

5 Ways Hybrid Viewing Enhances FinTech Applications

PrizmDoc’s Hybrid Viewing feature provides FinTech developers with several important benefits that improve application flexibility and deliver greater value to their customers.  

1. Resource Savings 

Hybrid Viewing minimizes server loads by offloading the bulk of the processing required to view a document to client-side devices. Reducing server requirements translates into lower costs and frees up valuable processing resources for other critical FinTech workloads. 

2. Scalable Viewing 

Shifting the processing work required for viewing to local devices allows FinTech applications to scale their user base with minimal cost. 

3. Enhanced Performance 

Offloading document preparation to the end user’s device improves viewing speed and responsiveness, especially for large documents. 

4. Increased Productivity 

Diverting workloads to client-side devices allows application users to process, view, and manage multiple documents faster. FinTech developers can leverage Hybrid Viewing to provide a better user experience that helps their customers to be more efficient and productive. 

5. Improved Storage Management 

For documents not already in PDF format, Hybrid Viewing can utilize PDF-based viewing packages that are significantly smaller than conventional SVG viewing files. Files can be pre-converted for fast, easy viewing without taking up extra storage space. 

Enhance FinTech Applications with PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing 

PrizmDoc’s new Hybrid Viewing feature allows FinTech developers to seamlessly scale their application’s viewing capabilities without having to deploy new servers or rethink their cost structure. Shifting document processing to local devices provides end-users with faster, more responsive performance, especially when viewing lengthy documents. By keeping viewing-related costs low, FinTech developers can focus their resources on developing new application features that help their products stand out in an increasingly competitive market. 

To learn more about how PrizmDoc’s Hybrid Viewing can benefit your FinTech application, talk to one of Accusoft’s PrizmDoc specialists today.

Redacting documents is critically important for legal departments and government agencies. By removing sensitive information from a digital file before sharing it publicly, it’s possible to protect private data or classified materials from being exposed. 

In the days before digital documents, redaction involved a simple, if crude, process of covering text with a black marker. Since redactions were done by hand, it was easy for mistakes to be made, which could range from using insufficiently dark ink to leaving portions of text exposed. The development of high-powered photo enhancement has rendered this approach all but useless, as even inexpensive image processing technology can distinguish blacked-out text.

With the transition to digital documents, organizations finally have access to true redaction capabilities. Unfortunately, they still tend to make mistakes when it comes to flattened PDFs that could leave redacted context exposed and vulnerable.

What Is a Flattened PDF?

A modern PDF file consists of multiple layers, each of which can contain separate elements. One layer might feature text, another image, and yet another a fillable form. The flattening process removes all interactive elements from form fields and combines all of the document’s elements into a single layer. 

Organizations frequently used this process to “lock in” form content to prevent anyone from altering the information after a user completes the forms. It also removes elements like dropdown selections within form fields and can burn in other annotations or markups, making them a permanently visible element of the document.

Flattened PDF Redactions

Unfortunately, simply flattening a PDF is usually not sufficient to securely redact a document. That’s because obscured elements are still present in the document; they’re just not visible when the file is viewed and printed. 

Recovering improperly redacted content is actually quite trivial in many cases. Two of the most infamous recent examples include information released during the investigation of political campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2019 and court documents related to Facebook’s use of personal data in 2017. In both cases, journalists were able to copy redacted text from PDF files and paste it into a text editor to reveal the obscured content.

There are typically two ways that improper redactions occur:

1. Covering Text with Boxes: This frequent mistake occurs when people try to treat a digital document like a physical piece of paper. They place annotations over the sensitive content, usually in the form of a black box, and then save a flattened version of the PDF thinking that no one will be able to separate the text from the annotation element. As the Manafort and Facebook cases demonstrate, however, getting around these “redactions” is usually quite easy.
2. Changing the Color of Text: Another common redaction error involves altering the color of the sensitive text to match the document background. Changing the text color to white, for instance, might make it invisible to the human eye, but it does nothing to alter the content itself. The text can be made visible again by using the copy/paste trick described above or by altering the background characteristics in another program. 

The only way to make these methods viable for true redactions would be to actually print the documents with the content hidden and then scan them back into digital form, where OCR could be used to reconstruct a new file. But even in this case, there’s a chance that a powerful OCR engine might be able to pick up the hidden elements.

Using Proper Redaction Prior to Flattening with PrizmDoc Viewer

In order to redact documents securely, applications need to have access to specialized redaction tools that are capable of actually removing content from the document itself before applying redaction indicators. PrizmDoc Viewer’s redaction API can find and extract key text while also providing single or multiple reasons for the removal. 

This not only allows organizations to redact documents quickly, but it also ensures that the redacted information won’t be exposed later because it no longer even exists within the document. More importantly, the outputted document is entirely new, so there is no deleted information to recover. 

While most people are familiar with the distinctive black bars that indicate redacted content, even this leaves behind significant context clues that could provide hints of what was removed. Consider, for instance, a document involving multiple parties where the names of conversation participants have been redacted.

The following information:

The length of the redaction, then, would at least indicate when the redaction did not involve one person or the other. There are also many instances involving government documents where the length of the redacted information in classified material might suggest its relevance or importance.

When it comes to GovTech applications that need to remove large portions of information for security reasons, it often helps to perform redaction BEFORE turning a document into a flattened PDF. The PrizmDoc Viewer redaction API can be used to quickly extract text from a document and then redact it as a plain text file. 

Unlike a static PDF document, plain text accounts for width variations, so all redactions can be replaced with a standardized <Text Redacted> marker that makes it impossible to know the length of the redacted content. The text could then be converted into a PDF after the redaction process is complete.

Take Control of PDFs with PrizmDoc Viewer

As a fully-featured HTML5 viewer, Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer delivers powerful viewing, annotation, and conversion functionality to your web application. It provides a broad range of redaction capabilities that allow legal, financial, and government organizations to keep their sensitive data secure and protect their customers. 

By integrating these complex features into your applications, you can focus your development efforts on building the tools that set your solution apart from the competition while our proven technology powers your customers’ viewing and redaction needs. To learn more about PrizmDoc Viewer’s powerful capabilities, download a free trial and test how it can support and enhance your application.

As part of our ongoing commitment to supporting the LegalTech industry in its effort to transform the processes used by law firms and legal departments, Accusoft recently sponsored an educational webinar in conjunction with Law.com entitled “Build or Buy? Learning Which Is Best for Your Firm or Department.” Hosted by Zach Warren, editor-in-chief of Legaltech News, the webinar featured Neeraj Rajpal, CIO of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, and Kelly Wehbi, Head of Product at Gravity Stack, a subsidiary of the Reed Smith law firm. 

Together, the panelists brought two unique perspectives to the ongoing “build vs buy” debate, both from the software vendors who provide LegalTech solutions and the decision makers working at the legal firms who make difficult decisions regarding technology solutions.

Build vs Buy: The Choices Before the Decision

Both Rajpal and Wehbi agree that any decision involving building or buying technology solutions has to begin with defining the problem a firm needs to solve. Regardless of whether you’re working with an independent legal firm or a legal department within a larger organization, it’s critical to understand the business problem, existing pain points, and potential value of a solution.

“When you start asking the right questions,” Raijpal notes, “you sometimes come across a situation where the requirements are not very clearly defined and that is a big red flag to me because when requirements are not defined, you’re not solving anything.”

Wehbi shares that concern about the requirements gathering process, pointing out that things tend to go wrong when firms fail to consider both the scope and magnitude of the challenge they’re trying to overcome. “Organizations can struggle a lot when they jump a little too quickly to a solution or to thinking about just what the return would be on a potential new product or service offered.”

It’s also critical to make sure that the firm is willing to accept some degree of change. If existing business processes are unclear or if no one is willing to consider changing how they work, then no amount of technology is going to make a difference. Understanding the culture of the firm and securing the buy-in from leadership is absolutely critical to making any technology integration succeed whether you’re buying a solution or building one from scratch. 

The Pros and Cons of Building LegalTech Solutions

For an organization that has the resources, methodologies, and skill sets necessary to develop a solution that’s specifically designed to meet its unique requirements, building can be a great decision. The key advantage here is that it focuses specifically on the firm’s processes and user pain points, allowing developers to design a solution that is much more targeted than an “off-the-shelf” product.

Benefits of Building

• Applications can be customized to your exact specifications, allowing them to better address your specific business needs.
• Since you manage the solution from end to end, you retain much more control in terms of application features and functionality, how data is managed, and access security.
• Developing a specialized solution creates room for innovative technology that can provide a competitive edge.
• A custom-built solution presents fewer integration challenges, especially when it comes to interfacing with legacy systems used by many legal organizations.

Risks of Building

• Building a new solution from the ground up requires a great deal of time and resources that might be better spent elsewhere.
• Investing in custom software creates substantial technical debt that must be maintained over time and could create integration problems in the future when additional upgrades are required.
• If the new solution doesn’t contribute enough to the bottom line to justify the cost of operations, it could lead to negative economies of scale that make it difficult for the firm to grow its business.

The Pros and Cons of Buying LegalTech Solutions

Not every organization has the development resources to build a customized solution from the ground up. If they’re not ready to make that capital investment, a cloud-based offering may be better suited to their needs. Leveraging a proven, ready-to-launch SaaS solution offers a number of advantages, but could impact how the company makes technology decisions in the future.

Benefits of Buying

• Since SaaS services are usually cheaper and easier to implement, they are often the best option for companies with limited IT resources.
• Cloud solutions are good for solving common technology problems that smaller firms face.
• Already-live functionality means SaaS solutions can be implemented on a faster time frame.
• The cloud vendor handles all building and maintenance costs associated with the platform.
• Since the vendor sets up workflows and integrations as well as troubleshooting, your internal team is freed up to focus on other tasks.

Risks of Buying

• Off-the-shelf solutions offer less customization and control over infrastructure and data.
• Even industry-specific SaaS solutions are built for a general market in mind, so their features may not solve your firm’s unique requirements.
• Since the vendor manages security, customers have less oversight over how their sensitive data is managed.
• Working with a SaaS provider exposes firms to market risk. If the vendor goes out of business or sunsets a product, it may be difficult to repatriate data or transition to another provider.

When to Build

For firms with the development resources that are already using in-house document management solutions to streamline processes, SDK and API integrations are often the best way to enhance functionality. Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Suite leverages REST APIs and advanced HTML controls to provide powerful document viewing, conversion, editing, and assembly capabilities to web-based applications. Our SDK integrations also allow developers to build the functionality they need directly into their software at the code level.

Document Assembly

Law firms need automation solutions that allow them to easily create and manage multi-part, multi-stage contracts. Thanks to Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Editor, legal teams can rapidly identify and assemble sections of pre-existing text into new content that is both editable and searchable. PrizmDoc Editor integrates securely into existing applications and delivers in-browser support to help lawyers assemble assets without resorting to risky external dependencies.

Case Management

LegalTech applications can manage and review cases much more efficiently by integrating data capture, file conversion, and optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities. The ImageGear SDK helps legal teams access case data in a variety of formats without the need for downloading additional files or relying on third-party viewing applications. It can also convert multiple file types into secure and searchable PDF/A documents, making it easy to tag files with client numbers, names, and other identifiable information. Thanks to PDF/A functionality, ImageGear ensures that firms can stay on the right side of federal regulations.

eDiscovery

The rapid transition to predominantly digital documents has fundamentally altered the way legal organizations approach the discovery process. Innovative eDiscovery processes can streamline case management while also protecting client interests. In order to implement these strategies effectively, firms need applications that provide extensive file format support and search functionality as well as redaction and digital rights management (DRM) tools capable of protecting client privacy. PrizmDoc Viewer delivers these features along with scalable annotation capabilities that make it easier for collaborators to proofread, review, and make comments to case files without creating version confusion. As an end-to-end eDiscovery toolkit, our HTML5 viewer also includes whitelabeling support so it can be fully integrated into your application’s branding.

When to Buy

For smaller legal teams looking for broad functionality without development hassles or a new firm taking its first steps toward document automation, it often makes more sense to implement a bundled, buy-in solution like Accusoft’s Docubee SaaS platform.

Document Completion

Docubee makes document management easy with drag and drop data routing. Users can quickly create legal contracts, route the appropriate data to documents, deliver contracts for approval, and facilitate signing with secure eSignature technology. 

Customized Templates

With Docubee, legal teams can create customized document templates and manage them on a section-by-section basis. Individual clauses can be added or removed as needed, allowing attorneys to repurpose document templates instead of creating them from scratch for every client. 

End-to-End Support

Two-way communication support helps firms to build better dockets and negotiate more effectively. Documents can be updated automatically and version controls ensure that everyone is always looking at the most up-to-date version of a contract. Docubee also allows users to prioritize key tasks with collaborative redlining and notification tools.

Long-Term Storage and Security

Docubee stores data for up to six years to meet eDiscovery requirements. To better protect client privacy and meet changing compliance requirements, firms can also set destruction dates for contracts, templates, and case files. Docubee is SOC2 compliant, featuring multi-layer encryption to keep data under tight lock and key.

Hear the Full Conversation

To hear the full webinar and learn more about how legal firms make the difficult choice between building or buying their next technology solution, sign up now to get access to an on-demand recording of the event. If you’re ready to learn more about how Accusoft technology is helping to power innovation in the legal industry by delivering the latest in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions, visit our legal industry solutions page or contact us today to speak to one of our product experts.