What should I use to process scanned contracts and extract fields?

For scanned contracts, the best choice is usually a document AI / OCR pipeline, not plain OCR alone.

Recommended approach

1. OCR to convert the scan into text
2. Layout-aware extraction to understand where fields appear on the page
3. Post-processing / validation to clean up and normalize extracted values

Good options

• Google Document AI – strong for forms, contracts, and structured extraction
• AWS Textract – good OCR + tables/forms extraction
• Azure Document Intelligence – solid for custom extraction workflows
• Adobe PDF Services / Acrobat OCR – useful if you’re already in Adobe’s ecosystem
• Open-source:
  • Tesseract for OCR
  • pdfplumber, pymupdf for text/PDF handling
  • LayoutLM / Donut / docTR for more advanced extraction

If you want custom field extraction

Use:

• OCR + regex/rules for obvious fields like dates, contract IDs, amounts
• ML/LLM extraction for less structured fields like party names, clauses, terms

Practical recommendation

• If you need a fast production solution: Google Document AI or AWS Textract
• If you need full control and can build pipelines: OCR + custom extraction model
• If the contracts are highly variable: use LLMs on top of OCR text, with validation rules

Important note

If the documents are truly scanned images, you’ll get much better results from a tool that handles layout and tables, not just raw OCR text.

If you want, I can recommend the best tool based on your constraints like:

• volume of documents
• accuracy needs
• cloud vs on-prem
• budget
• whether fields are fixed or vary by contract type