Searching the bundle

Anyone who’s ever represented a client in an employment tribunal will be familiar with the frustration of knowing you’ve seen a key document somewhere, but not being able to find it in a hurry. If this happens during the hearing, you may lose your only opportunity to make a particular point. It’s not so bad in the preparation stage, because you can probably track it down in the end – but you still waste valuable time.

The solution to this has been around for so long that I’m embarrassed only to have thought it now. It’s called OCR – optical character recognition. OCR software allows you to convert most printed material into a full-text searchable pdf. If you do that, then when when you find yourself thinking “blast, where’s that email where my client’s manager describes him as a malingerer?” – all you have to do is press ctrl+F (or cmd+F on a mac) and type in ‘malinger’ – and in a few seconds you should be able to find all the printed instances of that word in the bundle.

Don’t regard this as infallible. The software won’t be able to read handwriting; the particular word may have been obscured by a smudge; you may have remembered the gist but not the word (so if ‘malinger’ doesn’t find what you’re after, try ‘idle,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘swinging,’ ‘lead,’ etc). So don’t treat not finding what you’re after as definite proof that it’s not there.

But subject to those cautions, it’s a useful tool, and one I wish I’d been using for years. We’ll probably do a detailed ‘how to’ post on this subject in the next week or so – especially if there are several comments saying ‘yes, please do.’