alt Hacker NewsYes, remember that these are effectively random PDFs in various different designs and formats, some of them not editable or even OCR'd.
It took a human attorney 20-30 minutes on average to manually copy-paste data from these PDFs into a spreadsheet (while also fixing any errors they found in the document and re-checking for quality).
Now, the AI copies everything into the spreadsheet in a small amount of time, and then the human reviews it. It takes maybe ~5-7 minutes to scroll to the appropriate pages in the document, read the lines vs the spreadsheet, and make corrections. So you've gone from 2-3 items an hour to ~8-10 items an hour.
Maybe you could pay someone to develop an OCR/ML application that could do this. But that project would never be profitable, even with the time savings. At the cost of a couple Claude subscriptions, it makes sense.
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Don't forget that humans have a not insignificant error rate when copy/pasting or copy/typing data.
I'm doing some public court records processing for bankruptcy cases (interested mostly to seek out corruption in big national cases), and yes, the "variousness" of random PDFs is exactly the issue. Trying to get the cost for a whole case down to a minimum.
Sample is around 300 court dates, shy under 1k files.
At best I'm building a claude skills file.
Thanks for sharing the details. Does the attorney check that the AI copied the data accurately? Or is it just assumed to be correct?
Your experience mirrors my own. AI is great for parsing data that can take up a huge amount of time. My only concern is whether or not it’s done accurately. I wouldn’t use it for anything where mistakes cause serious consequences.
> Maybe you could pay someone to develop an OCR/ML application that could do this. But that project would never be profitable, even with the time savings. At the cost of a couple Claude subscriptions, it makes sense.
A better use of these Claude subscription would be to develop the app (which it can pretty much do at that point) and you could iterate to make the workflow even more efficient than your current one.
Does the human find enough bugs that they stay on guard, or just rubber stamp everything without really looking at it? It’s hard to stay vigilant when stuff looks plausible.