If you've worked in a law firm—or any type of office—for long enough, you know the key to controlling documents is flexibility. Some people like everything printed out. Some people want everything scanned. Some want to save documents in this folder or that folder or in the cloud. It can all be a bit overwhelming for IT managers.

That's the issue that nQueue is trying to solve with the release of InfoRoute 5, the latest version of the company's scanning platform. With the latest version, nQueue includes customized workflows, conveniently named “queues,” into the platform to allow users to not only control where scanned documents are going but also to pause projects between scanning and routing. InfoRoute 5 also looks to streamline the process with a leaner UI and increased back-end speed.

What It Is: InfoRoute 5 is a document-scanning platform that acts as an intermediary between hardware systems, such as a workplace scanning machine, and the eventual endpoint of a document, such as a document management system, email or more. In the middle, the platform uses optical character recognition technology to scan the document, convert into smaller file sizes and allow for quality control or routing to other parts of a workflow, if needed.

“All elements of the scanning workflow are built into InfoRoute 5,” nQueue CEO Rick Hellers told Legaltech News. “There is no need to leave the application in order to do anything, including QA [quality assurance].”

What's New: It's all about the queues. The ability to pause the workflow process aims to allow for quality assurance and document scraping as needed, as well as to create workflows for specific departments like QA or finance. The queues also can pull out data in an automated or semi-automated way as desired, as well as pull metadata outside the document to be collected for other purposes.

Hellers said the company expects QA and form filing to be the two most common uses for the queues: “Our clients have been clamoring for a QA module, and the ability to do it right at the device, before the document is routed, is a game changer, especially when you consider that workflows can be set up that QA teams to work on a set of documents or even the same document.”

The Tech Inside: InfoRoute 5's OCR capabilities are powered by the ABBYY engine that is quickly making headway in the legal tech market—Apttus, for one, also uses the tool as part of its contract management system. For nQueue, the impetus behind utilizing ABBYY is a combination of speed and control over file size.

“ABBYY helps us deliver the smallest file size, which is important, considering that many courts have file size limits. It's also extremely fast (more than one page per second) and accurate.”

Hellers estimates that using ABBYY increases the accuracy of the tool by 1 to 2 percent. “Considering that there are 2.25 million words in a typical banker's box, 1 percent more accurate reduces errors per box by—this is shocking—20,000 per box,” he said.

Wait, Aren't They a Cost Recovery Company? nQueue did indeed see its rise through cost recovery, and previous versions of the software saw cost recovery as part of the scanning workflow process. But this time, Hellers said, that's changed.

“That's one of the biggest changes. Cost recovery is now simply a part of the process. Most tools, including previous versions of InfoRoute, require the user to be logged into cost recovery, even if there is nothing to be recovered on that project. Now, cost recovery only even comes up in the specific workflows that call for it,” he explained.