So, thanks to a global pandemic, you’ve been forced into running your business remotely. Perhaps this is a scenario your company was prepared for. Far more likely, you’ve found yourself scrambling to move to a 100% remote workforce with little time to prepare. The good news is: no matter where you find yourself on the preparedness scale, it’s not too late to set your business up for success.

There’s a popular Chinese proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Basically, if you want success and growth in the future, the time to prepare your business for remote work is now, rather than wasting time wishing you’d taken action earlier.

So, where does one begin when remote work has been so suddenly forced upon you? Certainly, there are dozens of issues to consider when it comes to optimizing a remote workforce — too many for us to adequately address here. So, for now,  we’ll stick with what we know best — how to manage your documents and forms.

Why Automation and Digitization Is Critical

To begin with, if you’ve been operating with paper-based processes — entering data manually on forms, distributing and filing paper-based documents, or collecting in-person signatures — those days are over…at least for awhile. So, if automating and digitizing your paper-based processes was on your “nice to have” priority list, it’s probably time to move it into the “must-have” category, pronto.

When it comes to managing a remote workforce, there’s also the tiny issue of security. Simply put, digital files are generally easier to secure than paper documents. This is especially important when your employees are working from home, where you have less control over who has access to those documents. 

Scanning and sending documents via email also poses a potential security risk if the documents are lost or stolen in cyberspace. Not to mention the fact that your employees’ inboxes are likely flooded with messages, making it hard to keep track of and manage those documents effectively. 

Many business leaders also feel that automating your documents, forms, and processes can help your business better weather the storms of an economic recession, including the one we appear to be entering now. According to  Forbes, 63 percent of business leaders say that automation tools will help safeguard operations against economic downturn.

Automation Offers Long-Term Benefits to Business

Even when you’re back in your office, there are probably many processes you can implement now that will help streamline your business for the future. According to TotalProSource, implementing a well rounded digital automation software solution can benefit your business long-term,  in many different ways, by enabling you to:

• Access and complete documents easily, from anywhere, whether using a mobile device on the road or working offline at home. 
• Collaborate with team members no matter where they’re located, and eliminate manual processes. 
• Collect information and signatures and put them to work on automated workflows.
• Integrate with systems you already use to get the most ROI.

Choosing the Right Digitizing and Automation Solution

When it comes to your business, we know that a document isn’t just a document and a form isn’t just a form — they’re both critical components of how your business operates. That’s why you must look for an automation solution that easily integrates with your existing systems to ensure you are getting the most productivity and ROI.  

In order to help your business succeed in this changing environment, you need a solution like Docubee, a process automation tool that simplifies the creation, routing, review, and approval of documents and forms. Not only will Docubee help optimize your business for a remote workforce, it will also help enhance your operations for the future by allowing you to:

• Digitize your forms and document in minutes to collect the right information the first time and put it to work.
• Route, revise, and approve documents with multiple collaborators.
• Empower employees to build their own configurable workflow solutions.
• Automate workflows that enable your team to work and collaborate more efficiently.
• Create workflows to meet your unique needs and integrate with your CRM and other favorite tools, using a configurable, no-code workflow designer that puts you in control of the process.

Ultimately, by automating and digitizing your forms and documents, you’re not only setting up your remote workforce for success now, you’re also preparing your business to avoid disruption in the future — anytime you, or any key team member is unable to make it to the office.

An automated forms processing solution can significantly improve accuracy and efficiency when it comes to managing large quantities of documents containing structured content. Whether an organization needs to digitize existing records or is continuously processing new documents within application workflows, having a versatile optical character recognition (OCR) component working to identify and extract text from multiple languages allows them to capture data more effectively.  Solid OCR form capture is critical.

Although a good OCR engine operates quickly and efficiently, the process of recognizing and extracting text is a highly complex undertaking that can be impacted by a variety of factors. Under optimal conditions, for example, the OCR component within Accusoft’s FormSuite can generate results quickly and accurately, with the ability to read several languages from around the world. However, if an application’s forms processing workflow is not set up efficiently or overlooks a few important considerations, recognition performance may suffer in terms of speed and accuracy.

6 Ways to Achieve the Best Results with the Accusoft OCR Component in FormSuite

1. Pay Attention to Image Resolution

As a general rule, OCR components should be provided with high resolution images so the recognition engine is able to distinguish the details that would otherwise be missed on low resolution images. This helps them to recognize the differences between “l” and “i” or “O” and “0” (zero), which results in better, more accurate results.

However, there could be a problem if the image resolution is too high. These images require much more time to process without delivering any benefits since the required letter properties are clearly distinguishable in a lower resolution.

To strike a balance between speed and accuracy, it’s better to scan all images in a 150-400 dots-per-pixel range. This allows the recognition engine to identify all possible letter properties and avoid being bogged down with analyzing a lot of data at the same time.

2. Don’t Lose Image Properties While Preparing to Recognize

To achieve the best results, it’s important to provide the recognition engine with a few helpful hints. In some cases, resolution properties may be lost while an image is being prepared for recognition, leading to worse than expected results. This happens most frequently when working with System.Drawing.Image or SystemDrawing.Bitmap classes directly during operations like clipping, merging, or reducing the bit depth. 

In this case, the best solution is to make sure that HorizontalResolution and VerticalResolution properties are set correctly and reflect initial image resolution values. The ScanFix component within FormSuite can perform this task automatically and is designed to be compatible with the OCR component to help achieve better recognition results.

3. Clean Up Underlined Text Before Recognition

Specks, dirt, and other imperfections within the source image can significantly reduce recognition quality. Sometimes, however, even a seemingly good image can be recognized incorrectly when there are underlined words like URLs, emails, or specifically formatted generic text. 

From the software’s point of view, this kind of text isn’t very different from other types of image distortion. ScanFix’s LineRemovalOptions can clean up the text by eliminating lines that could interfere with recognition. The API also features special parameters that ensures characters with low hanging elements (such as “j” or “y”) will be restored after line removal to avoid another potential recognition problem.

4. Use Long-Living Objects to Avoid Recognition Performance Drop

Creating a new instance requires OCR engine initialization and loading neural network data suitable for specific recognition parameters. This process is not resource free because of the data complexity and may cause delays from ~200 msec to 2 sec depending on the hardware and recognition properties. 

Existing Accusoft OCR instances may be reused to recognize other images with different properties. This will speed up the overall process because initialization will be done only once during the first AnalyzeField call and subsequent calls will be much cheaper in terms of computing resources.

5. Assign Instances to Their Own Worker Threads

Objects are thread safe and can be called from different threads. However, assigning an object to its own thread can avoid extra locking. One of the simplest ways to do this is to use C# Parallel.ForEach loop and create ConcurrentQueue with the pre-allocated objects. 

This ensures that the number of threads will not exceed the number of available CPUs. Any available instance can then be automatically assigned to recognize the images in their own thread while extra possible threads will wait until busy instances will be free to acquire.

Other common patterns are producer-consumer and map-reduce, which are more complex to implement but provide better flexibility when managing input data.

6. Dispose Objects to Avoid Memory High Memory Consumption

This is a generic rule for the C# to call a Dispose for the objects which use non-managed resources. FormSuite’s OCR component uses an external recognition engine, so it is highly recommended to call Dispose when the instance will not be required anymore. This can avoid a situation where the memory will not be available for different parts of the application, especially when a high amount of data exists for post-processing or the amount of available memory is low because of the different processes running in parallel.

Get Accurate OCR Data Capture Results with FormSuite

When properly configured and incorporated into a forms processing workflow, the FormSuite OCR component can accelerate automated data capture and reduce manual errors. Its zonal field recognition capabilities allow it to hone in on predefined field types to improve processing speed and accuracy. Developers can also adjust confidence values for recognition results to determine how frequently manual review is necessary. 

To get a hands-on look at how FormSuite incorporates OCR seamlessly into its collection of forms processing tools, schedule a free trial today.

TOTVS Fluig, a leading business management systems provider, improved document viewing by integrating Accusoft’s PrizmDoc solution, addressing challenges with Microsoft Office files. PrizmDoc offered advanced features like text search and annotation. Transitioning to an Accusoft cloud environment ensured scalability and compliance. With PrizmDoc, TOTVS Fluig efficiently handles millions of viewing requests, focusing on core products while relying on Accusoft. Their partnership promises future growth and innovation.

For many years, the legal industry proved resistant to the changes that were pushing other organizations toward digital transformation. Although the serious shocks of the 2008 financial crisis were not enough to spark a revolution in LegalTech automation, they did at least get many firms to start thinking differently about how they deployed technology. 

After enduring the disruption of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, firms are finally implementing the software applications that will help them to deliver legal services far more effectively. In order to understand what’s driving today’s LegalTech trends, it’s important to first recognize why changes that didn’t take place in 2008 are happening now.

Why 2020 Differs From 2008

The legal industry was not spared the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis. Rather than reassessing their fundamental business model, most firms reacted to the recession by laying off personnel. According to the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), nine percent of US associates lost their jobs over a nine month period between 2009 and 2010. 

While this strategy managed to protect profits in the short term, it had a negative impact on their talent pipelines in the long run. More importantly, firms also had little immediate incentive to rethink their business processes. Reducing personnel and increasing rates allowed them to meet their immediate revenue goals, and the basic structure of delivering legal services remained mostly unchanged. And, to be fair, many LegalTech automation platforms were not yet mature enough at that time to deliver clear value, especially when compared to the costs of implementation. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has presented firms with a very different set of conditions. Almost every sector was impacted and it was not immediately clear how long the disruption would last. Social distancing requirements made it all but impossible for attorneys to meet with clients in person. After the initial wave of salary cuts and furloughs, firms were forced to think about how they could continue to deliver services in the midst of a pandemic.

Customer expectations have also changed dramatically since 2008. Legal clients expect faster, more efficient services delivered at a competitive price point. In order to grow revenue beyond 2020, firms will need to reorient themselves to do more with less, adopting the technology infrastructure that allows them to build more efficient processes and automate low value tasks so partners and associates can focus on other areas.

Post-2020 LegalTech Trends

Historically, the business model of most legal firms focused on immediate priorities and a reactive demand model that proved resistant to automation and efficiency. Since firms tend to look to metrics like PEP (Profit per Partner) to judge the health of the business, investing in process-oriented technology that would enable support staff to work more efficiently was rarely appealing. That’s because such investments would eat into short-term profits without offering a clear benefit in the future. 

But those benefits had very real potential, especially for firms and legal departments willing to look at different, less partner-driven business models that put more emphasis on customer-centric services. The firms that made the difficult decision to invest in LegalTech automation early now find themselves in a better position to thrive in a post-2020 landscape than competitors who were slower to adopt.

While premier “big law” firms will likely continue to offer high-value legal work to clients that require more specialized, strategic services, other firms and departments will be in an ideal position to capitalize on the type of work that benefits more from LegalTech automation. Specifically, they can leverage technology to meet known demand, or the day-to-day low to mid-level legal services that many customers expect and budget for. This is the type of work where efficient processes and automation make it possible for firms to take on more work and quickly scale their operations. It’s also a more customer-centric approach that acknowledges the ability to deliver legal services swiftly and cost-effectively will be a tremendous competitive advantage in the years ahead.

A Second Chance at Digital Transformation

Moments of crisis and disruption typically provide organizations with the opportunity to innovate and rethink their approach to how they do business. The legal industry, however, largely failed to adapt significantly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Firms were often unwilling to change their processes or invest in new technology solutions, which makes it even more vital for them to adapt in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In some respects, the industry is getting a second chance to undergo true digital transformation. Due to the unique circumstances of the 2020 downturn, there is every reason to expect that the demand for legal services will grow substantially in 2021 and beyond. From cases and contracts that could not be resolved during the pandemic to a broad range of lawsuits related to COVID-19, legal organizations will need to put the right digital tools in place to handle caseloads efficiently. 

Stay Ahead of LegalTech Trends with Accusoft Integrations

In order to keep pace with rapidly developing LegalTech trends, developers need to be able to build versatile and reliable software that they can bring to market quickly. Building innovative tools to facilitate contract negotiation and eDiscovery is challenging enough without also creating the content processing and conversion capabilities that facilitate them. That’s why LegalTech development teams under resource and time constraints frequently turn to specialized integrations that allow them to add essential features without pulling their attention away from their core area of focus. This helps them get their products to market faster to keep their customers ahead of the latest LegalTech trends.

Accusoft’s collection of powerful SDK and API integrations allows developers to build the features they need on their own terms. For instance, PrizmDoc Editor’s document assembly capabilities allow firms to automate the contract creation and editing process to minimize human error and boost efficiency. PrizmDoc Viewer’s conversion, annotation, and redaction features make it an ideal fit for eDiscovery workflows that require high levels of flexibility and security. And when it comes to managing different types of documents and files throughout the legal process, having an image processing SDK like ImageGear that can convert, compress, and OCR a broad range of file types can transform a LegalTech application into a content management powerhouse.

To learn more about how Accusoft’s collection of processing solutions can help your team meet today’s LegalTech automation challenges, talk to one of our industry specialists.