Recently I was in a firm where a partner told me he had had a case where his client produced 30 gigs of discovery documents. Most of them were pdfs which were not searchable. He manually went through all of these documents. Many of them were duplicates…or one word changed from one doc to the next.
How would I have handled this? I would have created a batch operation which ran the optical character recognition feature in Acrobat on an entire folder of pdfs and put the new pdfs in a different folder. Then I would have run the full Acrobat search on the new folder to find the words or phrases for which he was looking. I would have created a pdf portfolio of all the documents (including other file formats than pdfs, such as Word, Excel, TIFF, JPG) and added fields to describe the individual documents. Duplicates would have been put in subfolders within the pdf. All documents would then be in one file, with descriptive names and fields noting whether requested search terms were found in that particular document.
If you have a large project which appears to need massive manual work, call us first. If you think there should be a better way to do something, there probably is a better way and we probably know what it is!
