Smartphone scanner apps have come a long way. They can convert your picture of a document to a PDF file and many allow you to easily combine several pictures into one PDF document.

Lawyers like free apps. So let’s begin with Adobe’s Scan Digital PDF Scanner, which works with either Android or iOS phones. It’s simple to use and can also recognizes text automatically (OCR). This app gets good reviews with one slight downside. It apparently focuses on the document quickly and may snaps the shot before you are ready.

If you work with Office 365, you may want to try Microsoft Office Lens/PDF Scan because it has a special feature– good text recognition for handwritten notes. A downside with this app is that the scanned image isn’t as clear as Adobe’s.

If you want a top of the line app that works seamlessly with multiple pages and creates high-quality PDF’s, then Scanbot Pro is the best solution for $69.99. There is a free version available, but Scanbot Pro is a powerful tool. It captures documents with precision and does necessary cropping and filtering to generate a high-quality document. It OCR’s all documents and even has a feature to fax documents. The company is transitioning to a subscription-based model with Scanbot 9. But the subscription may be well worth it.