[blindlaw] Questions about Reading Large Documents

[Rahul Bajaj]

Hi Everyone,

I hope this message finds you well.
I wanted to solicit suggestions from you all about the possible
strategies that I may be able to adopt to deal with the following
challenges:
A. Almost all documents that I am required to read in order to draft
any written submission in an ongoing litigation are in the form of
inaccessible PDFs. While FineReader helps me convert these documents
into word and helps make them partially accessible, the quality of the
output is still not up to the mark. More specifically, I face the
following 2 problems:
1. Tables in the original PDF get disintegrated into several parts
which makes it difficult to make sense of the information that they
contain;
2. Since the devil is always in the detail, it is critical to access
specific bits of information such as the date on which a certain event
happened, the para number of the submission of the other party, the
precise figures that have been set forth, etc. Even though I use Fine
Reader 11 and have tried using applications like RoboBraille to obtain
better conversion results, the final Word Document often does not
convey such information accurately. For instance, if I have to draft a
para-wise reply to the other party's written submission, I need to
know the precise para number in which they have set forth a specific
assertion. I am unable to do so at this juncture.
B. In a large word document, how can I quickly jump to a certain
document that forms the subject matter of the legal dispute? For
instance, if I have to quickly refer to a letter that one party may
have sent to the other, how can I get to that in an expeditious
fashion? The table of contents delineates the page numbers on which
various documents can be found, but unlike a PDF, one cannot jump to a
certain page number in a Word document, as far as I know. Further, the
sequence of the page numbers also gets disrupted by the conversion
process from PDF to Word.

Would be grateful if anyone could share possible ideas for grappling
with these challenges.

Best,
Rahul