BLLAWG » OCR

TIFFs? They’re so 1991.

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:55:20 +0000

In an industry that prides itself on cutting-edge technology, why are so many people still using a file type that is archaic? Adobe owns the rights to the TIFF image file format and has not updated its specifications since 1991. That same year, the Internet was first opened for commercial use, the World Wide Web was introduced to the public and Linux was released. Clearly, technology has come a long way since 1991. So why, then, are firms still reviewing and producing in TIFF? When PDFs are Web optimized/linearized, there isn’t a version of TIFF that can load faster over the Web, no matter if it’s single or multi page. The advantages to PDF over TIFF go on and on. PDFs themselves can also be text-searchable, unlike TIFF files, which have separate text files associated with them. Thanks to Adobe’s PostScript control language, PDFs print exactly as they’re viewable online. TIFF’s bitmap makeup makes for poor, pixilated images when printed. PDFs are also operating-system independent and can be loaded and viewed on any computer. PDFs are more innovative, efficient, and useful than TIFF files. If file types had expiration dates, TIFF would be as rotten as Jeffrey Dahmer (who, by the way, was arrested in 1991).

For more information about the advantages of PDF over TIFF, see the white paper.

How to Look Like a Rube in Three Easy Steps

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:31:10 +0000

Josh Gilliland and his always-entertaining “Bow Tie Law’s Blog” turn this week to the case of In re NetBank, Inc., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 69031 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 7, 2009), in which the producing party went to great lengths to prove to opposing counsel and the court that they knew absolutely NOTHING about e-Discovery.

The Defendants (the producing party) refused to produce native files, opting instead to produce TIFFs with OCR text (not extracted text, but OCR). They claimed that:

1. Native file production would promote alteration of the file contents (what, they never heard of MD5 hashing or maintaining a forensically-defensible authentication file?);

2. Native file production would prohibit Bates numbering, and possibly software incompabilities (Bates numbering is not an issue if each file is uniquely named, and obtaining the proper software for review is the proponent’s problem, not the producer’s); and

3. Performing OCR on the TIFFed files was the only way to make them searchable (ignoring, of course, the simple fact that native files are themselves searchable, with much higher accuracy than OCR).

The Court ordered the production of native files, because the Producing Party gave “no good reason why they should not produce…in native format.” In re NetBank, Inc., 74-75.

Josh does not report whether the judge then snickered at the Defendants in open court.

I write with a somewhat flip attitude about this, but the simple truth is that ESI production is now part-and-parcel of a litigator’s daily practice. If attorneys cannot find the time to learn about the basics of e-Discovery, it is well worth the expense for them to retain someone who knows those basics. It would certainly save them the embarassment that counsel here brought upon themselves.

Is OCR Worth the Money?

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:35:56 +0000

Joshua Gilliland is a California lawyer who writes “The Bowtie Law’s Blog”. In this entry, he discusses the recent decision by Judge Ron Clark in Procter & Gamble v. S.C. Johnson, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13190 (E.D. Tex. Feb. 19, 2009). The part of this opinion that’s important to us are Judge Clark’s observations about the utility of performing optical character recognition (OCR) on paper documents:

OCR, while perhaps not absolutely necessary to litigation, is a tool that greatly decreases the time and effort counsel must invest in searching and examining documents. Presumably, each party would perform the OCR process in a cost-effective manner to minimize their costs. Requiring the parties to incur this cost, when the OCR process is likely to streamline the discovery process and reduce the chance that either side will employ tactics designed to hide relevant information in a mountain of difficult-to-search documents is neither unreasonable nor burdensome.

In other words: Yep, it’s worth every penny.