For scanning followed by OCR, FineReader recommends 300 dots per inch. We find 200 dpi works well, resulting in smaller images with faster scanning. Both the scan and the text are put in the appropriate Lotus Notes database, with fields, such as summary and categories, filled out by the person doing the scanning. We file the paper original when scanning is done. All lawyers involved in the case are immediately sent e-mails with links to the new database entries containing items from that day s U.S. mail.
Lawyers can then read the document and edit fields in the database.
This way, every electronic file or database for a particular litigation is built promptly. The only paper mail that a lawyer receives each day is junk mail. All mail is automatically processed on the front end. This beats the old paper method, in which a lawyer manually processes incoming mail, assigns tasks and finds mistakes on the back end. Ironically, front-end processing reduces the amount of photocopying.