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Mander Cruickshank is a UK-based family legal practice founded in the early 1920’s. Their growing practice required an ever larger amount of staff resources dedicated to converting PDFs of their most important documents such as leases, contracts and home information packs. This task is now far less time consuming thanks to the adoption of ABBYY PDF Transformer. 

Challenge

Every day legal practices around the world need to work with and amend documents that have been sent in various formats. This was certainly the case for Mander Cruickshank who regularly receives dozens of legal documents from clients, government officials and other lawyers. It is very often the case that these documents are sent in PDF format which usually requires a conversion before the document can be edited or worked with further. This necessitates many hours of manual work by employees before the actual legal work can begin. For Mander Cruickshank the time-consuming and inefficient task of unlocking the data inside a PDF was carried out by an administrator who would cut and paste the text into Microsoft® Word so that the content could be edited.

The trouble with this process is that, more often than not, after the cutting and pasting many of the formatting elements of the original document change unexpectedly or are simply not recognized. Issues such as this meant that staff would have to spend more time sorting out the formatting before the documents could be useable. For small documents this was not a major issue, but for documents in excess of ten pages this had become a time wasting exercise that they could not afford.

Solution

Mander Cruickshank needed to find software that would quickly and efficiently convert a PDF document to Microsoft Word with little manual intervention. They had two basic requirements for any software they purchased: an accuracy rate of at least 90% and the ability to convert a 50 page PDF document in less than five minutes. After trying various programs which claimed they could do this but either failed entirely or fell short of their expectations, Mander Cruickshank found ABBYY PDF Transformer® through a web search of PDF conversion products.

ABBYY PDF Transformer is the ideal solution for anyone working with PDF files. This intuitive, versatile, multilingual tool enables users to easily convert any type of PDF into editable formats with the original layout and formatting retained. Creation options include the ability to convert a PDF directly from Microsoft Office applications with just one click, combine multiple files from different sources into one PDF and adjust PDFs according to the user’s needs - redact sensitive information, add stamps and bates stamps, turn your files to searchable and protected PDF documents, or convert them into PDF/A format. Based on ABBYY’s intelligent technologies, PDF Transformer ensures superior conversion accuracy and provides quality results in no time.

Mander Cruickshank tested the demo version with a variety of PDF Documents and found on average the documents were converted within one minute and the results were 99% accurate. They were very pleased with the few steps it took to perform a conversion and the logical and easy to understand interface. Even with the most difficult documents - often those that contain images - the program’s interface allowed the user to identify and differentiate between varying elements of the document before final conversion was completed.

Outcome

PDF Transformer has been well received by the staff whose previous tasks were focused solely on converting documents. They find the program very easy to use and that it provides significant increases in productivity, cutting down the time spent converting documents by at least 75%. This has allowed Mander Cruickshank to be vastly more efficient in the handling of case work and to provide a quicker and more thorough service to their clients. To date they have purchased multiple licenses for PDF Transformer and the intention is, as the needs of their practice continue to grow over time, to add additional licenses.

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