If you have ever tried to review scanned contracts or make sense of handwritten notes, you know how unreliable traditional optical character recognition (OCR) can be.
By design, OCR attempts to convert images of text into something you can search and edit, but it often struggles with low-quality documents and handwriting. Mistakes can force teams into time-consuming manual corrections, and those gaps in accuracy can mean higher costs and added risks. But Generative AI is changing that.
By improving OCR, GenAI converts complex, messy data, such as forms, images, handwritten notes, and multilingual documents, into more reliable, searchable content. Additionally, it enables faster review by summarizing lengthy documents and images (that’s new!), highlighting the most important issues, parties, and timelines. And with advanced language translation, foreign-language materials can be quickly understood without the delays of full-scale manual translation.
Together, these capabilities make discovery data more accessible, accurate, and defensible, enabling litigation teams to work faster while achieving better outcomes.
Improved OCR
- Current: Traditional OCR struggles with poor scans, handwriting, and complex layouts, leading to missed keywords and costly manual correction.
- Enhanced: GenAI OCR context-aware models interpret words in relation to surrounding text, handle messy documents, and preserve tables and forms.
- Result: Using GenAI OCR results in higher accuracy and fewer missed documents due to poor quality images.
Image Summarization
- Current: Many discovery items are images, screenshots, and handwritten or scanned notes, all of which require manual review.
- Enhanced: GenAI converts visual content into concise descriptions of what the image contains and why it matters.
- Result: Image summarization, along with GenAI OCR, provides counsel faster means to triage and prioritize documents that contain little to no text.
Text Summarization
- Current: Review teams spend significant hours digesting lengthy documents and email chains.
- Enhanced: GenAI generates summaries at varying levels of detail, highlighting key issues, parties, and timelines.
- Result: Having a summarization of a document’s text accelerates early case assessment (ECA) and helps prioritize high-value documents.
Language Translation
- Current: Not all documents align with your native language and, as a result, require costly, time-consuming translation.
- Enhanced: GenAI provides quick, reasonably accurate translations with awareness of context and legal terminology.
- Result: Providing quality foreign-language translations without reliance on human translators or costly third-party applications, GenAI greatly enhances the speed of review.
Better Support
At TCDI, we’re noticing remarkable results with Generative AI, including this advanced OCR. These capabilities are breathing life into legacy projects, opening doors to new opportunities, and ushering in a new era of what support will look like for our clients.
Most importantly, we can confidently say that GenAI isn’t replacing human judgment. It’s enhancing it. This is why our team has spent over two years researching and developing a human-in-the-loop approach to eDiscovery in the TCDI Tech Lab. As a result, we’re seeing the discovery process become more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective, allowing the humans at TCDI to focus on better supporting our clients.
Ronn Power
Author
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