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Jul 5, 2016

A Question For Federal Court Wonks

     The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Of North Carolina is now requiring that Social Security make the transcripts that Social Security files with the Court be searchable. The other two Districts in North Carolina aren't doing this. How common is this nationwide?
     By the way, searchable Social Security disability claim files at the administrative level would be nice.
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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:09 AM, July 05, 2016

    I've never seen the rep side software but for our side it is searchable with E-view. Its decent but its not perfect because it uses pixel readers to read the medical records and it obviously doesn't catch handwritten stuff in the records. I rarely use it, only for huge files.

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  2. Anonymous10:45 AM, July 05, 2016

    Converting the .tif files provided by ERE at the administration level into .pdf files and then OCRing (optical character recognition) using adobe's built-in OCR feature (under the "document" tab) will do a decent job at allowing adobe's built-in search ability to work. Cut-and-pasting is difficult though if the documents are even slightly illegible. The OCR feature will assume dust and specs are apostrophes and the like.

    Our District Court requires the documents be searchable, however what ends up happening is only the headers/case numbers are searchable, not the text of the documents themselves. You can actually get around it by converting the .pdf excerpts into .tif, then back into .pdf files and OCRing them.

    Takes a long time. Good project to begin running before you leave for the weekend.

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  3. Anonymous10:48 AM, July 05, 2016

    10:45 here again, I should mention we use adobe acrobat 9, other versions might differ in ability and layout.

    Also, the District Court I am referring to is the District Court of Arizona.

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  4. Anonymous10:58 AM, July 05, 2016

    There is no such thing as a PDF document that cannot be searched. Just delete any "tag." Save. Then OCR. The .tif method is for those who want to waste time. The court just wants SSA to save it ten seconds. And for slowness, get a faster computer.

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  5. Anonymous2:56 PM, July 05, 2016

    I have seen a few district courts stating that that's their policy in general (i.e., they want all large files OCR'd so they're searchable for the court), but allowing SSA off the hook because the OGC says their PDF file is "not compatible" somehow with OCR capability. Strikes me as BS, since I manage to OCR their files for my own purposes every time.

    ReplyDelete