Case study: how a mid-sized law firm cut PDF review time by 40 percent

Kováč & Partners is a 40-lawyer commercial firm in Bratislava. They review roughly 300 contracts a month across three practice groups. Before nctools, their workflow relied on a mix of Adobe Acrobat licences, an on-premise OCR appliance from 2018, and a lot of manual copy-paste. After a three-month pilot, average time per contract review dropped from 68 to 41 minutes. Here is what changed.

The old workflow

A junior lawyer received a signed PDF, ran it through the on-prem OCR (average 6 minutes for a 40-page contract), exported to Word via Acrobat Pro (another 3 minutes plus manual clean-up of headings), and forwarded to a senior for markup. Total setup time before review even started: 15-20 minutes.

The new workflow

Contract lands in the shared inbox. Junior drops it into /tools/pdf-to-word directly from Outlook — no download-then-upload. Conversion completes in 8 seconds. Word file is attached to the matter file in iManage and forwarded. Setup time before review: under a minute.

What actually moved the needle

1. Speed. Client-side conversion is faster than any of their previous tools because it removes the network round-trip.
2. No uploads. The compliance officer approved the tool for use with client documents on the first pass because nothing leaves the device.
3. Consistent output. All lawyers now get the same Word formatting, which means the review templates work without adjustment.

“The compliance sign-off was 15 minutes. Every other tool we evaluated took six weeks of back-and-forth with our DPO.”

The 41-minute number

The savings are not evenly distributed. Senior lawyers save maybe two minutes per contract. Juniors save 25 minutes because the setup work disappears. The firm quantified that as roughly 240 hours per month of associate time freed up — the equivalent of 1.5 FTE.

What did not change

The actual review work — the reading, the redlining, the negotiation — is unchanged. We do not automate lawyerly judgment. We automate the mechanical work around it.