Ranked #1 out of a total of 93 products, we’re proud to share this exciting news with you.

http://blog.technolawyer.com/2014/03/primafact.html

Email or call now to find out more on how Primafact can benefit your practice!

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.

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TechnoLawyer – The Paperless Litigation Practice Becomes a Reality

Leveraging the powerful and friendly features of Apple’s iPad, our new app puts your entire case in your hands, wherever and whenever you need it.

You can synchronize to the iPad any case that is available on the desktop version of Primafact. Once synchronized, your cases will be instantly accessible on your iPad, even when you aren’t connected to the Internet.

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Primafact for the iPad extends the core functionality of our desktop/notebook solution to the iPad.

Primafact for the iPad provides:

• Synchronization of entire cases to your iPad, providing instant access to your documents on the go.
• The ability to work online or offline, with any changes made on the iPad synchronized back to your main document store.
• Support for full text searches, including those within annotations, with search results highlighted right on the page.
• The ability to create annotations/notes on the fly, and tag them with your own customized list of Case Issues for instant retrieval.
• Routing of documents to/from the iPad – allowing you to review documents and provide instructions to your staff via Primafact while out of the office.
• Emailing of documents directly from the app.
• Additional features to be announced soon….

Primafact for the iPad will be available later this year and works as a mobile extension of your existing Primafact implementation.

Contact Stephen Starkman (stephen@primafact.com) to learn more.

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.

A sound backup strategy is especially important if your law firm is going paperless. In addition to the obvious reasons, there are special considerations – mostly related to the volume of data you will be storing.

Law firms need to scan a lot of paper, much more than most businesses. And, scanned images take up much more space than documents originally produced on the computer. Typically, a scanned document requires six to ten times the space of the original word processing document.

Planning for capacity

Your backup system must be capable of handling a full backup of the Primafact database:

• It should be able to backup all the data, unattended
• It should be fast enough to easily complete the backup over the weekend
• It should be able to handle whatever volume of data you will have in three years

Note: If you plan beyond three years, remember to balance costs. The cost of a more powerful backup system may be much less three to five years from now. Also consider that when the time comes to upgrade your server, you are likely to also upgrade your backup system.

It may be difficult to predict the size of your Primafact database. As a start, think in terms of banker’s boxes and your average case. A banker’s box holds 1,000–1,500 pages.

We suggest budgeting 25 GB for every 100 banker’s boxes. So, if you take on an average of four cases a month and each case averages one banker’s box worth of documents, in three years you would expect to have the equivalent of about 144 banker’s boxes of paper in Primafact. Thus you will need to back up 36 GB of data.

You should also think about your peak capacity. Eventually, you will start moving closed cases out of Primafact (these cases can be archived to DVD discs or a hard drive). Approximately how many banker’s boxes of active and dormant cases do you have now, on and offsite? You can calculate your peak storage requirement (x GB) as follows:

x = (current number of boxes for active and dormant cases) / 100 * 25

What to backup

Primafact stores data in two places:

• Image files on a network drive
• Metadata in a Microsoft SQL Server database

For a complete backup, both the image files and the SQL database need to be backed up.

All image files are stored in a folder called PfDocs on a network-accessible data drive. Backing up these files should be straightforward for any backup system.

The SQL database requires special consideration. Microsoft SQL Server will run 24/7 and lock its internal data files so that no other software can read them. There are two ways to get around this:

1. Have a SQL Server Maintenance Plan in place that will make a nightly copy of the SQL database on the file system. The file can then be read and backed up.The Primafact installation automatically sets up a maintenance plan to do this (by default, backups are written five times a week to a folder called PfBack and any backups older than three days are automatically deleted).
2. Use backup software that can handle live SQL databases. Generally backup software vendors can provide an add-on module to make this possible, at an extra cost.

Where to back up

We recommend that you back up either to tape or to a portable hard drive. Tape is still the most reliable and manageable medium, although hard drives are becoming increasingly popular. Your IT provider should be able to suggest the best solution for your needs and budget.

At this time, we do not recommend that you back up Primafact data directly to an offsite storage location. Currently, the storage size required for scanned document images makes it impractical and expensive.

You need to make sure that your backups are taken offsite for safe keeping. You should establish a procedure to ensure you have a recent, full backup in a secure offsite location at all times. The procedure should be easy and regularly scheduled.

When to back up

You should make a full backup of your Primafact data at least once a week, with differential backups on a daily basis.

A differential backup stores all data that has changed since the last full (weekly) backup. An incremental backup only stores files that have changed since the last incremental backup. If you ever have to restore an incremental backup, you may have to restore from as many as six backup sets, whereas with differential backups you will never have to restore from more than two.

You can schedule full backups for the weekend (they take longer), while you should be able to schedule differential backups overnight because they are much quicker.

Monitoring backups

Chances are that sometime in the life of your practice you will have to restore from a backup. It is common for firms in this unfortunate position to have to face the realization that their backup system hasn’t been running for many months.

Any backup system you create is eventually going to fail, so it must be monitored. Many firms leave monitoring up to their IT supplier. Make sure your IT supplier has systems in place to regularly monitor your backups.

If you rely on a Microsoft SQL Server Maintenance Plan to create a copy of your SQL database (i.e., if you have not purchased and implemented special software to back up the live SQL database), someone must monitor the creation of these files on a regular basis.

Critical points of failure

Certain events that can lead to a breakdown of your backup system:

• Change in staff. If a staff member is responsible for checking backups, make sure this duty is re-assigned if that person leaves your firm. You will find out too late if your backup system stops working
• Change in IT Supplier. Make sure your new IT supplier is fully aware of how your backups work and has systems in place to monitor the success of both the SQL Maintenance Plan and the backupWindows Server Migration. Make sure the Primafact data is getting backed up after a migration to new hardware. Changes to security settings and drive mappings can cause the SQL Server Maintenance Plan to fail
• Migration to a new Microsoft SQL Server. Remember to set up the Primafact backup Maintenance Plan on the new SQL Server. Make sure that the database copies created by the SQL Server are getting backed up

More Information

The Wikipedia article Backup is an excellent starting point to understand backup concepts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup

The type of scanner you choose depends on the volume of scanning and who is going to be doing the scanning.

Scanners fall into two categories:

Desktop scanners

• Low-end and multifunction (not generally recommended)
• Workgroup (2,000–4,000 pages per day)
• Departmental (4,000–25,000 pages per day)
• Production (30,000–100,000 pages per day)

Network scanners

• Multifunction (useful for occasional scanning of large documents)
• Dedicated (not generally recommended)

Here are a few words on different types of scanners.

Low-End Scanners

Personal multifunction desktop scanners are good for low-volume, ad hoc scanning, such as individual letters or bulletins. Unlike higher-end scanners, you cannot scan directly into Primafact. These scanners produce .pdf files that can then be imported into Primafact.

Workgroup Scanners

These scanners are excellent for ad hoc scanning. The more powerful models in this range are very good for low-volume scanning of case materials and are generally appropriate for smaller firms and sole-practitioners.

Departmental Scanners

These scanners are appropriate for firms with enough volume to warrant dedicating one or more staff to scanning, naming, and organizing case materials.

Production Scanners

These are heavy-duty scanners for medium and large firms with centralized scanning services. A machine of this type would usually be used by a single staff member devoted to scanning, with other staff naming and organizing the scanned documents.

Departmental Multi-Function Copiers

Multi-function copiers (MFCs) are not appropriate as a primary scanner in any but the smallest firms. Because staff also print from these machines periodically all day, it would be impossible to scan documents uninterrupted. Also, scanning using an MFC requires extra steps because the documents cannot be scanned directly into Primafact. However, these machines can be very good for scanning large documents (such as 600-page medical reports). Having an MFC may justify a less expensive choice for your primary scanner.

Dedicated network scanners

These scanners are a fairly recent innovation. They have the power of a low-end workgroup scanner (about 20 pages per minute) and are a good solution if everyone in the office needs to do ad hoc scanning.

Determining your scanner workload

The best way to determine the scanner you need is to measure your daily duty cycle, which is the approximate number of pages you will scan per day.

Experience has taught us that lawyers rarely realize how many pages they process, but there is a simple way to determine the approximate number: A banker’s box typically holds about 1,000–1,500 pages.

So, ask yourself the following question: “How many new cases (assuming an average of one banker’s box per case) does the firm take on each month?”

If the answer is 12, then budget for 12 banker’s boxes, or as many as 18,000 pages per month, which is just under 1,000 pages per day. If the person responsible for scanning has other duties and only scans two or three days a week, you will need to have a scanner that can support a higher daily duty cycle, say between 1,500 and 2,000 pages.

Of course, some cases require many banker’s boxes for all the associated materials, such as a brain injury case, which may require as many as 40–50 banker’s boxes, or a class action, which may use 75–100 or more.

Choosing your scanner

There are four major scanner manufacturers: Canon, Fujitsu, HP, and Kodak. All four have excellent products.

With the exception of HP, all the manufacturers categorize their products as workgroup, departmental, or production; however, there is no consistency about where one category ends and the next one starts.

HP and Kodak have fully embraced the idea of using the daily duty cycle to select a scanner and this number is given for all their models. Unfortunately, Fujitsu and Canon only mention this number on a few of their models.

Tips:

• Make sure the scanner you select has a TWAIN interface
• When reading specifications, be aware that 90% of your scanning will be in black and white at 300 dots per inch (dpi) in simplex (single sided) mode
• You will need to scan in colour. If the scanner you choose will not handle colour, you can choose to get a low-end colour model to supplement the black and white model (note that you can attach more than one scanner to a single workstation)
• Your primary scanner should scan at least 20 pages per minute. Be aware that scanning speed is often given for a resolution of 200 dpi. Since you will be scanning at 300 dpi, the actual speed will be about 60%–75% of the rated speed
• Your primary scanner should have a feeder that can handle 30 pages or more
• Make sure the scanner you choose will handle duplex scanning (scanning both front and back), as this is an important feature
• Check the warranty. Only Kodak has a standard three-year warranty; the rest offer one year (which you may be able to upgrade to three years at a cost)

Popular models

Generally we don’t recommend specific scanners – that is the job of your IT provider. The following models are popular with our customers, and, with the exception of the ScanSnap, popular with us.

Fujitsu fi-6230Z
This model has been around in one form or another for well over a decade. It is a favourite with many of our customers. The combination flatbed and straight-path ADF make for reliability and versatility with a small footprint.

Canon DR-6010C
This is another popular scanner that has been around for a long while. It is robust, reliable, and fast, and is suitable for high-volume scanning (e.g., if your firm is just starting to use Primafact). At 60 pages per minute (at 200 dpi), a banker’s box worth of documents can be scanned in less than half an hour (even at 300 dpi, the preferred scanning resolution).

Kodak i2600
This scanner takes up very little space, which is deceptive, because it is a very fast scanner (50 pages per minute at 300 dpi) and has a feeder capacity of 70 sheets. Because of its small size, it is a very nice scanner to have sitting on your desk – convenient and fast, yet unobtrusive.

Fujitsu ScanSnap
The Fujitsu ScanSnap gets special mention because it is a very popular low-end scanner that is very attractive if you are budget-conscious. We do not recommend it because it does not have a TWAIN interface and thus cannot scan directly to Primafact.

If you decide to go with a ScanSnap for ad hoc scanning, be aware that users will have to perform an extra step: the ScanSnap saves .pdf files to the hard drive and then those files have to be imported into Primafact.

1. Don’t edit a template directly. Copy it to a new folder and then work on it so that you don’t overwrite the original.
2. Delete any unnecessary tabs or sections by right-clicking on them and selecting delete.
3. Rename and move tabs or sections that have been earmarked for change.
4. Add in any required new tabs and associated sections.
5. When you have finished adding tabs and sections, drag the tab to it’s new location:
   • Click once on the tab you wish to move.
   • Left-click on the selected tab and hold the button down.
   • Drag it to its desired location, up or down in the list of tabs for the binder (keep your pointer as far to the left in the binder as you can). As you move up or down within the binder, you will see a thin red line – when the line is located where you want to place the tab, let go of the mouse button and the tab or section will stay where it’s dropped. If it’s not quite in the right place, repeat the drag and drop.

Take a look at the example below.  We are moving the tab “Economic Loss Reports Prepared for the Plaintiff” to its new position between “Special Damages other than Loss of Income” and “Background of the Plaintiff”.

With Primafact you can implement any of three different scanning workflow models: centralized, distributed, or hybrid. Each is described below, with its associated pros and cons.

Centralized model

Incoming mail is given directly to the scan operator, who immediately scans the material into Primafact. Once each piece is scanned, the scan operator moves it into the Primafact Inbox for the responsible clerk, paralegal, or assistant who then names the document and files it in the appropriate binder. Once the mail is scanned, it is put away in a banker’s box for storage, filed, or shredded.

Pros:

• The turnaround time is often much faster when documents are given directly to a scan operator
• Documents are less likely to get lost or borrowed by someone before scanning, and thus be inadvertently omitted from Primafact
• Quality control is improved because scanning is done by one person or by a scanning department in larger firms
• Your cost may be lower because a scan operator doesn’t require specialized legal knowledge, and thus does not need to be a clerk or paralegal who would be higher paid

Cons:

• You must assign a backup person in case the scan operator is away from the office for any reason
• You may need a full-time employee if the daily volume of incoming documents is high

Distributed model

Incoming mail is distributed to clerks, paralegals, and assistants, who are responsible for scanning and filing the documents. These staff scan, name, and file all new documents into the appropriate binder(s).

Pros:

• The workload is spread across a number of people
• A dedicated employee is not required to scan incoming documents

Cons:

• Sometimes scanning isn’t done in a timely fashion because of other demands on the time of clerks, paralegals, and assistants
• Documents are more likely to get lost or borrowed by someone before scanning, and thus be inadvertently omitted from Primafact
• The quality and consistency may vary because scanning is done by a number of people
• The scanning process may be disrupted if the clerk, paralegal, or assistant is on vacation, off sick or does not have enough time in the day to complete their scanning tasks in addition to their other tasks

Hybrid model

The hybrid model is based on the distributed model, but with large scanning jobs done by either a third party scanning company or the print/scan/copy department in the firm.

Pros:

• The workload is spread across a number of people
• Internal resources can better focus on their primary tasks

Cons:

• Sometimes scanning isn’t done in a timely fashion because of other demands on the time of clerks, paralegals, and assistants
• Documents are more likely to get lost or borrowed by someone before scanning, and thus be inadvertently omitted from Primafact
• The quality and consistency may vary because scanning is done by a number of people
• Outsourcing may be more expensive on a cost per page basis than performing the task internally

• Colour documents that contain no text that don’t need to be displayed in colour in Primafact should be set for 300dpi, greyscale
• Colour documents that you want to display in colour in Primafact should be set for 600dpi, colour
• Greyscale should only be selected for images and pictures (not text)

Tips:

• Remember to change the settings back to the default – black and white, 300dpi – once you are finished
• Scanning in greyscale and colour take longer and take up more space in your Primafact database

Typical scan settings for letter size black and white pages.

More scanning tips:

• Consider a scanner with a flat bed for scanning small documents (e.g., receipts). It will take less time to get such documents into the system. Some clients report they tape receipts to paper and then photocopy them
• If a document original is very light, try adjusting the brightness of the scan downward. OCR may not provide good results from a very light document
• Do a test scan of documents on colored paper. Scan and then view in Primafact and adjust the brightness or contrast in the scanner settings as necessary
• If you have trouble feeding a document into your scanner, feed it in upside down (i.e., spin the pages 180 degrees). Once the document is in Primafact, you can rotate it quickly using Primafact’s rotate option
• Have a dedicated work area for scanning with the following available: staple remover, stapler, rubber stamp for marking documents as scanned and space to organize your documents
• Consider organizing your documents according to type to minimize the need to change your scanner settings: letter and legal size; single and double sided; color, greyscale, and black and white; flatbed scanning

Once your scan station is set up and you have scanned a variety of documents, scanning into Primafact will be easy!