I am NOT in anyway a court official, and I don't doubt that some FReepers actually process legal subnmissions as part of their day job.
I ask them to contribute to this thread - and to clear up any errors I've made.
Agere
I agree with your observations with regards to the Michigan filing and OCR causing the spelling and spacing errors. I haven’t spotted any obvious errors in the Georgia filing, but then I haven’t read it as thoroughly either.
OCR makes sense. I use it a lot to find indexed news articles from newspaper archives, and the “spelling” mistakes are often very bizarre.
You are mostly on target. At some point the documents are scanned and converted via OCR into a searchable text file (this is actually somewhat cumbersome and unnecessary, but change in the mechanics of the legal system is glacial, at best). Both electronic and paper documents are involved. OCR still has issues with fonts that are complex in some fashion (bold, serifs, cursive, even mixed number-letter formats).
The initial filing was likely scanned from paper into an image, then processed via OCR back into a searchable electronic format (PDF) for transmission to the court. The probably immaculate paper documents will follow along and possibly never be looked at in more than a cursory fashion until they are used for trial prep.
I used to do a lot of work with electronic documents and document automation and much of it was for legal documents (lawyers). They submitted documents electronically, but they were followed up by paper copies.
No. They are all submitted in PDF format. Now, most of the common word processing programs out there give the option to save in PDF. If it is a PDF with fillable fields, you need to flatten the PDF before filing to make sure no one messes with the entries.
Most of the pleadings I've downloaded over the years have been pretty clean.
You are probably getting the idea by now, but it seems that ALL documents submitted to court are put through a OCR process.
Wrong.
Pleadings are drafted in a word processor such as WordPerfect. A PDF is created and saved within WordPerfect by pushing a button. No OCR of the electronic document is required to produce the OCR, it is simply a conversion process. The OCR document is submitted to the court via the electronic filing system.
Attachments to pleadings may be scanned copies of paper documents.
I like the theory that the errors were deliberate — to force the leftist media to cover the story. Of course, the media focuses on the non-issue of the spelling errors — but by doing so, they are actually covering the story, which they’d otherwise ignore and be trying to bury.
Why can’t they import Word or PDF files instead of scanning hard copies?
Rhetorical question.
I do not expect you to have an answer.
I amm not whir-eed about it.