Enter Primafact. Designed for litigators, Primafact offers the tools you need to intensively work on your case – no matter where you are.

Primafact’s simple interface is designed to enhance the way you work, making it easy to organize and instantly access your documents. With multiple mobility options, including laptop synchronization, you can make your downtime more productive. Easy access to simple tools needed to review, develop, and assign work on your files means you’re always a step ahead.

8 key features of Primafact

If you’re not yet familiar with Primafact and how it can help your practice, here are eight features to start you off:

• Complete mobile file access.
• User-friendly trial binder presentation – set out files the way you want to see them, making review much easier than with Windows Explorer or document management software.
• Built-in optical character recognition (OCR) and Google-style full-text searches help you find and identify critical references – fast.
• Highlighted search results right on the document are also designed to speed up your searches.
• Work delegation tools – including user inboxes – let you delegate tasks to staff or access important new documents as soon as they arrive.
• Non-destructive, standardized markups allow structured, shareable case analysis.
• Easy document sharing keeps everyone on the same page.
• Binder and annotation templates get you started painlessly.

Learn more about these and other features here – and start making the most of your scanned documents.

There’s more to the story. If you are interested in building a winning paperless litigation practice, read our post on the topic.

For more information about Primafact, please contact Stephen Starkman at 1-877-726-3228 (Canada Toll Free), 1-877-873-0592 (USA Toll Free) or sales@primafact.com.

Unlike a text, email, or word processing file, documents scanned into Primafact are stored as image files (a picture, really) as either .tif or .pdf files. When the image is displayed on the screen, you can read it, but to the computer it is just a series of black and white dots. The computer does not recognize any “words” on the image.

So how does OCR “decipher” the scanned pages and convert them to editable text? OCR software looks at each line of the image and attempts to determine if the black and white dots represent a particular letter or number. Once the dots are translated, Primafact’s OCR program stores the result as plain text within the associated TEXT tab for that page. All the documents you store in Primafact are thus searchable and you can copy and paste text from Primafact into other documents.

As wonderful as OCR is, it is important to understand its capabilities and limitations. While it’s a great tool, it’s not perfect. A scan of a poorly photocopied document may yield extremely poor results. For example, the photocopy may have been on a slight angle, or have light and dark patches, or may be a photocopy of a photocopy or a photocopy of a fax. In all such instances, the OCR program will not be able to effectively read characters and thus translate those characters into logical text.

Handwriting is also problematic. OCR software cannot read handwriting because everyone’s handwriting is unique. For example, a Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) report form filled in by a police officer will have both printed text and handwriting where the officer has filled in the details. The OCR program will translate the printed text but not the handwritten information. Primafact gets around this limitation by allowing you to annotate the page with manually typed text referencing the handwritten portion(s) of the page. This is also how you would handle handwritten clinical notes and records.

Primafact’s OCR software is an extremely powerful tool that can create vast amounts of text data that is searchable and readily accessible. As long as its limitations are understood, OCR can greatly benefit law firms of all sizes.