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OCR turns a scanned document into text you can read, search, copy, and feed to every other Vaquill AI feature. It handles the material that defeats ordinary text extraction: photocopied contracts, filed exhibits, faxed correspondence, and handwriting. Find it under Review → OCR.
Screenshot of the OCR tool showing the upload area for scanned PDFs and images

The OCR tab in the Review hub

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When to use it

  • A scanned PDF that no other tool can read, because there is no text layer in it
  • Court exhibits or filings received as images
  • Handwritten notes, annotations, or signed forms
  • Any document where copy and paste produces nothing

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Running it

1

Upload

Drop in a PDF, JPG, PNG, or TIFF. Up to 100 MB and 1,000 pages.
2

Flag handwriting if relevant

Tick Handwritten document when the file contains handwriting. This switches to AI vision, which is slower but substantially better at handwritten text. Leave it off for ordinary scans, where the default path is faster.
3

Watch it work

Progress reports the real stages: analyzing page layout, reading text per page, reconstructing tables and formatting, then saving.
4

Read and export

Results appear side by side, the original PDF next to the extracted text, so you can check the extraction against the source. Copy it, or download as TXT or DOCX.

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What it preserves

Extraction is structure-aware rather than a flat dump of characters. It detects text regions, tables, and headers, then reconstructs the document’s shape as clean text. Tables come back as tables, not as a scrambled run of numbers.
The side-by-side view is the point. Spot-check the extraction against the original before you rely on it, especially for figures, dates, and party names, where a single misread character changes meaning.

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Handwriting

Handwriting is genuinely harder than print, and the results reflect that: accuracy on handwritten text is meaningfully lower than on tables and printed matter. Treat handwritten output as a draft transcription to verify, not as a reliable record.

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OCR elsewhere in Vaquill AI

You usually do not need this tool. Documents uploaded into a matter are already run through OCR automatically during ingestion, which is why scanned PDFs are searchable without any extra step. See File Formats. Use the OCR tool when you want the extracted text itself as an artifact: to read it, to check an extraction you do not trust, or to get a clean TXT or DOCX out of an image-only file.

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Limitations

  • Accuracy depends on scan quality. A skewed, low-resolution, or heavily marked-up page extracts worse than a clean one.
  • Handwriting recognition is materially less accurate than print. Verify it.
  • Extraction produces text, not legal meaning. It does not analyze, summarize, or review what it read.
  • The 100 MB and 1,000 page ceilings are hard limits. Split larger files before uploading.
  • Complex multi-column layouts and heavily nested tables may not reconstruct exactly.

File Formats

Everything Vaquill AI ingests, including automatic OCR on upload.

Legal Tools

The Review hub this tool lives in.

Documents

What happens to a document after it is ingested.

Document Search

Searching the text once it has been extracted.
Last modified on August 6, 2026