Cricket Legal Technologies offers clients one-stop shopping for all of their eDiscovery technology needs. The Cricket Discovery Suite processes electronic documents and prepares them for detailed attorney reviews and document productions. Cricket’s product is used both in-house to provide these services to their clients, and is leased to clients who opt to process eDiscovery document collections themselves. But data in documents such as unsearchable TIFFs and PDFs would have remained locked away without ABBYY FineReader Engine.
“ABBYY FineReader Engine is one of the premier OCR products available on the market today. Our clients have come to depend on its superior accuracy and foreign language capabilities, which are critical in our business,” said Chris Olsson, CEO, Cricket Legal Technologies, Inc.
During litigation, outside counsel firms for the plaintiff and defendant will request documents from each other. Documents are collected and reviewed by attorneys prior to presenting to opposing counsel. The ability to perform text searches to identify potentially responsive documents is critical. And Cricket helps clients by providing an efficient and thorough review preparation.
The Cricket Discovery Suite processes email files and electronic documents, extracts attachments from email messages, extracts embedded documents from electronic documents and builds a searchable index with text that is extracted from the native (electronic) files. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is required to create searchable text for static file types such as TIFF and PDF files. On larger files, documents requiring OCR can easily reach hundreds of thousands of pages. Cricket knew that reliable and accurate OCR would be critical to their business.
Opposing counsel can challenge the process used to determine what documents were provided to them, which could result in possible delays, sanctions or potentially losing the case. Cricket’s use of ABBYY FineReader® Engine helps ensure that a client’s eDiscovery process is beyond reproach. “I recommend performing OCR on non-searchable documents such as TIFFs and PDFs to create text that can be indexed and searched by the attorneys,” says Chris Olsson, CEO of Cricket Legal Technologies. “This best-practice methodology is a critical component to a completely defensible document review strategy.”
Cricket staff was particularly impressed by several features they had discovered in ABBYY FineReader Engine:
• Level of OCR accuracy, especially with poor-quality documents over 50 years old
• Format retention
• Auto orientation detection, which enables the correct orientation of graphs and charts
• Flexible OCR settings, which allow varying speeds of document processing
• Advanced capabilities for processing foreign language documents
In our current economy, corporations are focused more than ever on their legal spend and are demanding more value from their outside counsel. The law firms that embrace technology as a means to provide more cost-effective services to their clients will have a competitive advantage. “Cricket helps them bridge that gap,” says Olsson, “and ABBYY enables us to do it better, more efficiently and more accurately.”
