The Connected Lawyer

This week my wife and I are celebrating our 16th wedding anniversary. Although we typically don’t do the gift thing for our anniversary, we decided to give each other a gift this year. Last night we exchanged our gifts. To my surprise, my wife bought me a Kindle.

I have been intrigued by the Kindle for quite a while. Plus I know that both Ernie the Attorney and Michael Hyatt love their Kindle. Thus, I was quite excited to get my hands on it and try it out.

My first impressions, after using it for less than 18 hours:

• I love the sleek, thin design.
• I love the pictures that are displayed on the screen when it is in sleep mode.
• The e-ink is crisp, clear, and easy to read.
• Buying a book is a very easy process (perhaps way too easy for me).
• I wish the bottom (where the keyboard is) was tapered slightly. I think it would be easier to hold and type on if it were.
• I wish it had a touch screen. the 5-way navigator works fine to move your cursor around the page, however, it does not work nearly as nicely or elegantly as it would if it had a touch screen.

Although I have the second generation Kindle, I recognize that this technology is really still in its first generation. I an anticpate that in the near future, we will see these devices with color screens, touch screens, and the ability to take notes on the screen. I know Plastic Logic is working on some aspects of this now. On the other hand, the Kindle has a market and appears to be selling well. Plastic Logic doesn’t expect to hit the market until 2010.

Anyway, I love the Kindle so far and my wife is awesome for getting it for me.

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Rick Borstein comes through with another great way to use PDFs in your legal practice: Adding dynamic exhibit stamps.

Rick explains:

Since PDF is the defacto (or often mandated) eFiling standard, it didn’t come as a surprise that I’ve received a few emails on this exhibit stamping PDFs over the last couple of years.

I’ve written previously about creating custom stamps, but an Exhibit Stamp has both a static graphic element and a changing numeric or alphabetic element. I have proposed a workaround using watermarks and the typewriter tool to some firms, but that still was a lot of work.

Only recently have I come across an elegant solution that can accomplish both steps with a click! When you stamp the document, Acrobat will ask you for the exhibit number, then stamp it on the document.

This is a great solution and anyone who uses PDFs in their practice should check it out.

Go here to get directions on how to install this stamp.

Also, once you have applied your stamps, don’t forget to flatten your page. Rick has instructions in his post on how to do that. You can find an alternative method of flattening here.

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