PDF for Lawyers

Important Acrobat Preference setting: enable copy text for comments

2012-04-26T13:34:54-04:00

I found out about this tip recently from David Masters (author of The Lawyers Guide to Adobe Acrobat). You want to go to your preferences in Acrobat and enable this immediately. The screenshot below (click on it to enlarge the view) shows what you need to switch on.

I also created a 4 minute video that demonstrates how to enable the preference, and also shows why the preference is useful. I don't know why Adobe didn't enable this preference by default. Certainly every lawyer or legal professional is going to want this as the default.

A view option you should know about in Acrobat & Adobe Reader

2012-03-04T14:59:38-05:00

The more you use Acrobat to view PDFs, and manipulate them, the more you should know about how to get the view you prefer. And you should know how to change views quickly. Most of all, you should at least know what your options are. And this is true even if you just use the free Adobe Reader.

Today let's focus on one of the options under the VIEW menu: the PAGE DISPLAY options (see graphic below). If you check out the choices under this menu you'll notice that you can opt to have a SINGLE PAGE view or a TWO PAGE view. Not many lawyers will want the TWO PAGE view, but you might so check it out to see if it appeals to you.

The options you will want to know about is the choice about scrolling. Let's say you're in single page view. Do you want each page to snap up, and automatically make the old page disappear? Or do you want to be able to scroll between pages like you would if you were looking at a web page?

I prefer not to have scrolling enabled, but most lawyers that I've shown the option to seem to prefer scrolling. I suspect that's because they're afraid they won't remember how to get back to it if they decide they want it. For me, there's only one time I want the scrolling view, and that's if I'm copying text that flows across two pages. Then I have to have scrolling enabled.

And, just so you know if you copy text in this way, the copied text will probably have extra stuff. Namely, whatever is in the footer and header sections. It's easy to delete, but it'll be there and annoy you if you have a lot of pages copied.

Anyway, the important lesson here is to learn how to enable, or disable, the scrolling view. It's under the VIEW menu (go figure!), and then under PAGE DISPLAY. Check it out sometime.

When should you OCR documents? A quick primer.

2012-02-13T11:26:00-05:00

Many people know that OCR stands for ‘optical character recognition,’ or if they don’t know that then they know that OCR is what you do to a scanned document to make it text-searchable. When you buy a new scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap it'll come with OCR software, and most people get the idea that they should OCR all documents that they scan. I don't recommend this, and don't know many "paperless experts" who recommend it.

First of all, even if your scanner comes with standalone OCR software you should just use the OCR function built into Acrobat. Each new version of Acrobat has improved on this OCR functionality, so just use Acrobat. It's always better to use one piece of software to do as many things as you can; it'll save you learning time and troubleshooting headaches.

Now when should you use Acrobat to do OCR?

To understand when to use OCR you need to appreciate a couple of things about OCRing documents. First, the process takes a couple of seconds for each page that you want to OCR. And by "a couple of seconds" I mean between 5 and 10 seconds, depending on your computer. That doesn't seem like much, but it is and here's why.

You can't scan in a new document while the last one is being OCR'd. So if you are scanning in your morning mail and you have 10 pieces of mail, you'd have to wait for each piece to be OCR'd before you could scan in the next one. Without doing OCR it might take you only 3 minutes to scan in those 10 pieces of mail (because you'll scan them in quickly and then go back and name them and file them after all the scanning is done). If you do OCR the process could take closer to 10 minutes.

True, you could scan in all the pieces and then batch OCR them, and this could be done while you were at lunch or having a coffee break. But, then we get to the next problem with OCRing documents: it makes the file-sizes a little bigger. Again, no big deal if you're talking about a few documents. But, over time you'll be talking about lots of documents, and that will chew up storage space.

But what about searchability? Isn't that the reason to OCR documents? And if you don't OCR the mail you scan then you won't be able to search it later, right?

Right, but the reality is that you won't be searching for mail very often, if ever, using text searching. Novices embarking on the paperless path have no idea what their tendencies will be so they are loathe to forego any option that might seem helpful. Experts know that the only documents that we tend to search (and which are therefore worth OCRing) are documents that are produced or received in a litigation case.

The mail and routine correspondence simply isn't worth the extra time (and extra file size) to justify OCRing.

When it comes to OCRing case documents you want to do a couple of things. First, you want to do the OCR as soon as possible after you've scanned them in. Create a copy of the file(s) you're going to OCR as backup first, in case something blows up. Second, learn to OCR one document at a time before you take up "batch processing."

Acrobat will probably prompt you to save your OCR'd document as new file with "OCR" appended to the file name. I don't keep two versions of documents if I can avoid it. So I just overwrite the old one with the OCR'd version (and if the new file is free from corruption or problems I delete my copy that I created as a backup).

Once you get comfortable with OCRing one document at a time, you'll want to learn to do "batch processing" so that you can OCR a folder full of documents. And you'll want to do this at night or when you'll be away from your computer for a long time. You'll need to babysit the first part of the process to respond to any initial prompts (but your prior experience will make you aware of how many prompts you'll receive, so you'll know when it's safe to leave).

In the past it was critical to OCR documents before attempting to bates-stamp them. In many versions of Acrobat that may still be true. I always OCR before bates-stamping as part of my workflow, and will continue to do this. I recommend you do the same to avoid any possible problems.

One last confession: I do sometimes OCR non-case documents, but only to solve a small annoyance. Sometimes the pages of a document that was scanned by someone else will be skewed to one side. I like my documents to be orderly and level, so I will run OCR on those documents to make them "straighten up."

For more posts on OCRing, click here.

Useful tip regarding digital signatures

2012-02-03T10:13:48-05:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing a 60 tips in 60 Minutes session with several good friends and follow law-techies. Even though I've done dozens of these 60 tips programs in the past few years, I always wind up learning something. Here is an interesting PDF tip I picked up, along with a useful/humorous one:

How to create a Digital ID for using with Adobe Acrobat, which Nerino Petro says is a surefire way to have true digital signatures that actually get accepted by the recipient. I'm going to start using this for sure.
Let Me Google That For You - I forgot about this one, but it's a classic. If you're adept at using Google but find that you get annoyed when people ask you for information that they could just as easily have googled themselves, you need to check it out. I won't ruin it for you; just go do a sample search and you'll see what this tool does.

If you want to see all the tips that we did, here's the link to our presentation.

Adobe Reader now enables digital signatures

2012-01-12T12:47:32-05:00

Adobe has added native EchoSign integration for users of Adobe Reader. Hence, those users can now: (1) digitally sign any document in Adobe Reader (with the new "Sign" button in Reader, and then (2) send the document out for others to sign through EchoSign. All this is free. This is a great development, especially if people actually start learning how to use real digital signatures. Click here for screenshots and to learn more.

How to learn Acrobat quickly and easily

2012-01-06T10:00:32-05:00

If you want to learn Acrobat quickly and easily you should check out Lynda.com, a service that offers online videos created by excellent teachers in a high-production format. You can try it for free for 7 days, and you should so that you can see for yourself why this service is amazing. They offer tutorials on every imaginable software, but let's focus on Acrobat.

They have several tutorials on Acrobat (versions 9 and the new Acrobat X), and what's great is that you can drill into a particular module that you're interested in. Each module is about 3 to 5 minutes long, so you don't have to get bogged down in an hour long session, which would be overwhelming and not conducive to learning. If you want to keep using Lynda.com it's $25/month. Well worth it if you want to quickly (and easily!) improve your software skills.

Adobe Acrobat - videos explaining how to use it better in law practice

2011-12-31T03:04:22-05:00

If you've attended any of Ernie Svenson's seminars on paperless lawyering you know he's a firm proponent of using Acrobat to work with PDFs. For those of you who want to review the benefits of Acrobat, or who want more in depth explanations of how it can help your law practice, check out these videos that Ernie created. They were done for a law school class on Practical Lawyering, but also they're useful for lawyers who want to learn how to use Acrobat better.

Sign contracts on your iOS device

2011-12-22T09:46:01-05:00

Adobe has just released the EchoSign app for iOS, which enables legally binding contracts to be signed with a click. The app is free, but the EchoSign service costs money. It's free for one user who only signs 5 times per month or less. The next tier of service is $14.95/month and allows one user to sign unlimited times. Not sure if this is of use to most lawyers, but some will undoubtedly be interested.

Adobe's online form tool gets useful a new feature

2011-12-06T14:30:58-05:00

Adobe has been developing some interesting online stuff (e.g. SendNow, which I've covered in a previous blog post). FormsCentral is an online tool that lets you build, distribute and collect forms (and form data). There are other folks who are doing online forms, most notably Google.

I've used Google's form tool and find it sufficient for basic needs. Where it (and I would guess other) online form tools fall completely apart is when it comes to gathering attachments along with a form.

Why would you gather attachments? Well, let's say you are an employer and you're using an online form to collect responses from potential employees. (Yes, a form can be used to accept applications. A form can be used to gather any responses or data.)

You can collect these kinds of responses using Google Docs' Form tool. But you can't collect PDF resumes or recommendation letters at the same time. Up until now Adobe's FormCentral tool didn't let you do that either. But today Adobe announced this new attachment feature as part of their FormCentral service.

I can see a law firm making use of this tool as a way of getting basic information from a new client (after some meaningful initial human contact, of course). And the feature that let's clients upload documents along with the information gathering might be useful too.

For more information about FormsCentral (as well as pricing) click here.

Adding bates-numbers in Acrobat is easy (and powerful)

2011-12-05T07:00:04-05:00

It's easy to add bates-numbers to PDFs using Acrobat. If the documents you want to bates-stamp are not yet in PDF format, then you need to scan them or convert them to PDF. If you have Acrobat 8 or 9 simply follow these instructions, which begin by having you do this: choose Advanced > Document Processing > Bates Numbering > Add.

The instructions are the same in Acrobat X, except that you'll have to click on on the Tools menu over on the right, then >Pages > Bates Numbering > Add.

Once you've bates-numbered the documents you can search for documents based on the bates-number. Choose Edit > Search, and then as the search word or phrase, type in all or part of the Bates numbering that you want to find.

Pretty easy, isn't it? Makes you wonder why anyone would do it the old-fashioned way.

Links for 2010-11-18 [del.icio.us]

2010-11-19T00:00:00-08:00

Pizza menus & online storage? Yes.
If storing restaurant menus online can bring efficiency and joy to quick food procurement, what might online storage do for lawyers?

Links for 2010-11-15 [del.icio.us]

2010-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Judge slashes Laos coup plot case, exposes secret testimony - Josh Gerstein - POLITICO.com
In a 44-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Frank Damrell through out large portions of a conviction in a bizarre plot to overthrow the Gov't of Laos. The judge made a (all too common, it seems) mistake of not properly redacting certain PDF documents.

Links for 2010-11-12 [del.icio.us]

2010-11-13T00:00:00-08:00

Acrobat for Legal Professionals
Great site: teaches lawyers and legal professionals how to use Acrobat better in the practice of law. Rick Borstein works for Adobe and knows this stuff backwards and forwards.
PDF for Lawyers: Digital Signatures
Information on how to create and use Digital Signatures.

PDF for Lawyers

Important Acrobat Preference setting: enable copy text for comments

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A view option you should know about in Acrobat & Adobe Reader

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