Husch Blackwell Streamlines the Digital Archiving Process, Reducing Time Needed to Prep and Scan Documents by 50%
Incorporating OPEX® Falcon+® Scanners With CertainScan® software created a faster and more accurate scanning and QC workflow for Husch Blackwell.
The Background
Husch Blackwell is a national law firm in the U.S. with 22 brick-and-mortar locations and a virtual office. In 2023, Husch Blackwell was placed in the top 100 law firms by the Am Law 100 Rankings. The Firm serves clients across the Education, Energy, Finance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Tech industries. The Firm’s Information Governance department and Digital Services department, a subset of Information Governance, manage records and digitize legal documents into the Firm’s document management system, NetDocuments. Information Governance and Digital Services, located in the Kansas City and St. Louis offices, are responsible for scanner operation, quality control (QC), and file uploading. Both offices contribute to Husch Blackwell’s paper-light initiative to reduce paper use by digitizing files.
The Challenge
Before the process was automated, the Information Governance department manually identified, prepared, and scanned legal files while adding separator sheets in between documents within each file. These files are sometimes as large as 800 pages, making the process significantly more time-consuming. The department relied on floor scanners to digitally capture records. This limited the amount scanned at one time and prevented staff from pausing to adjust files. These scanners also jammed frequently. The Firm’s files consist of mixed-document types and sizes, such as letter, legal, and A4, with some papers smaller than a business card. Some documents are thin, rice-textured paper and receipts, which cannot run through a typical scanner.
Key Challenges
The Solution
Husch Blackwell discovered OPEX® through a conference and invested in two Falcon+® scanners, one for the Kansas City office and the other for the St. Louis office. Each is powered by OPEX’s CertainScan® intelligent document imaging software suite, including the CertainScan Edit and Transform modules. Husch Blackwell partnered with OPEX to ensure seamless replication of updates or new scan jobs between scanners. The Firm established predefined workflows for various tasks, including barcode identification, document scanning, and file uploading directly to the document management system. This centralization streamlines scanning processes across all offices, reducing setup time and facilitating the creation of a master scanner or control center. This configuration guarantees that updates and scan jobs initiated on one scanner are promptly accessible on the other.
The Falcon+ scanners have reduced prep and scan time by 50%, allowing the Information Governance department to digitize significantly more than they could initially. The Falcon+ scanners quickly capture images and process information from mixed document types and sizes, including thin paper, receipts, and pages smaller than a business card with virtually no prep work involved. This type of work would have originally been done on the glass of a copier, but with the Falcon+, the job is processed automatically in much less time. Approximately 4,000 files were scanned in 2023 between the Kansas City and St. Louis offices.
Information Governance captures everything in a file using the Falcon+ scanners, then uses Edit to crop images and remove blank pages. Once each image has been fully edited, the images are automatically uploaded into the Firm’s document management system. CertainScan enables the scanning process to be paused when needed, allowing pages to be added.
With this software, staff no longer need physical separator sheets to divide documents within files. They can add digital separators between documents, reducing paper usage and achieving its paper-light goal. This solution also enables the user to choose color scanning from page to page, ensuring the file size in the end product is as small as possible.
“The fact that we can set up so many jobs within the OPEX Falcon+ really helps when sharing the machine between two different departments.”
Kayla Byrd
Information Governance Supervisor,
Husch Blackwell
Key Results
50%
Reduction in time needed to prep and scan documents
+4K
Files scanned in 2023
Automatic upload into the document management system
The Future
With its solution from OPEX in place, Husch Blackwell can now digitally manage legal files faster and more accurately. This allows its attorneys to access information quicker, ultimately providing better service to clients. The Information Governance and Digital Services departments enjoy working with the Falcon+ scanners with CertainScan software and are continually working to maximize the output of their OPEX systems.
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