The Connected Lawyer

I work with PDFs a lot. I can’t tell you the last time I pulled a paper file to look at a document in it. Instead, I look only at my electronic copy of a file. Navigating in a PDF, however is not always the easiest thing to do, especially if the creator did not include bookmarks or other reference points.

An additional problem can arise when you are working with a document that has different styles of page numbers. An example is a brief, that may include pages i through x for the prefatory matters and Arabic numbers after that.

At her blog Going Paperless, Molly DiBianca, provides a useful, easy to follow, step-by-step tutorial on how to remumber your pages in a PDF.

The process she describes is easy to do and it is post I definitely recommend that you check out.

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On Tuesday, I attended the Acrobat demonstration that I recently posted about. As usual Rick Borstein and Mark Middleton did a great job. Despite the fact that I had already seen each portion of the presentation as part of a webcast, there were still things that I learned that I would never had known had I not gone.

There is still time for you to sign up for the presentations in Seattle or San Francisco. I cannot urge your strongly enough to learn how to leverage the power of Acrobat.

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Rick Borstein just announced that he is presenting 3-hour Acrobat demonstrations in Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Seattle. If you work in or near one of these cities and want to improve your Acrobat skills, you should take advantage of this opportunity. I have seen Rick present several times, and he always does a great job.

I believe that Acrobat is one of the most underused programs available. Use this opportunity to change that fact in your office.

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One of my favorite features in Adobe Acrobat is its ability to add Bates numbers to hundreds of pages in less than a minute. Another great feature built into the Bates numbering feature is that, because Acrobat stores the Bates numbering information as metadata, it allows you to remove the Bates number from the documents. This is particularly convenient if you find that you want to reorder your documents before you produce your documents to the other side.

The downside of this flexibility, of course, is the fact that if you send these documents to someone else, then they can also modify your Bates numbers. Fortunately, this issue is one that is easy to solve and Rick Borstein explains how in a post on his Acrobat for Legal Professionals Blog. As Rick explains:

The ability to remove Bates Numbers is valuable in case you make a mistake during the numbering process. However, due to the adversarial nature of the legal business, attorneys may desire to limit what the other side can do with documents.

* * *

In this article, I’ll discuss how to “lock down” Bates Numbers so that they cannot be removed by Acrobat’s “Remove Bates” option.

In his post, Rick explains to how protect your Bates numbers in both a single documents and in multiple documents. Check out the entire post for his easy to follow instructions.

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One of the things I love about Acrobat 9 is the ease with which you can create forms. Adding form fields is quite easy and makes working with pre-printed court forms a piece of cake.

I was recently working on a form the other day, however, and realized that I wanted to create a field that automatically calculated the information based on the information provided in another field. I know that you can create calculated fields in Acrobat, but I don’t know how to create the calculation script for what I want. I was hoping that some Acrobat expert has a suggestion for me.

What I am looking for is a script that will do the following: Field 1 is a date. For field 2, I would like the field to automatically calculate the date 3 days before the date entered in Field 1.

Is this something that can be done? Does anyone know how to write this script?

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Anyone familiar with my blog knows that I am a big proponent of storing every document in every file electronically. When I talk about this, one question that many people ask is what kind of scanner to get. One of the most popular scanners is the Fujitsu ScanSnap. This scanner is reasonably priced, works well, and is easy to operate. Three qualities that I am sure have helped its popularity.

Knowing the right hardware to use, however, is only part of the battle. You also have to know how to integrate that hardware into your workflow. Recently Rick Borstein posted a tutotial on how to best integrate a ScanSnap with Adobe Acrobat.

As with many of Rick’s posts, he takes you step-by-step (including handy pictures) through how to best set the scanner up to use it with Adobe Acrobat. If you are considering adding a ScanSnap to your desktop, you definately want to check out Rick’s post.

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Recently I posted about an article I had published in Chicago Lawyer Magazine about using Adobe Acrobat as part of my legal research workflow. I have received a couple of questions relating to the article relating to which version of Acrobat you need and how to create an index so that the research is searchable.

With respect to the question of what version of Acrobat is needed, that depends largely on what you want to do with the research that you have. If what you are concerned with is reading your research and annotating it any of the paid versions of Adobe Acrobat will work fine. Please note that the free Adobe Reader will not work for this. You must have one of the paid versions. Alternatively, a program such as NitroPDF would work just fine for this as well. In fact, I find Nitro’s commenting and mark-up tools easy to use than Acrobat’s.

However, if you wish to make your research fully searchable by creating an index that spans multiple files or multiple folders, you will need either Acrobat Pro or Pro Extended. These allow you to create a very powerful index. Doing so is actually quite simple. Further, Rick Borstein has already done all of the work of demonstrating how to do this.

In a blog post from a couple of years ago, Rick explains how to create an index in Adobe Acrobat. Although the instructions provided are for Acrobat 8, they also appear to be the same to create an index in Acrobat 9.

Additionally, for those who learn best by watching, Rick has some how-to videos to talk about search options in Acrobat. In particular, he has one that talks about the differences between Find and Search and one that demonstrates how to build a full text index.

As you can see from Rick’s post and demo, creating an index is an easy thing to do. Further, it can certainly aid you when you want to search through your PDFs, whether they relate to legal research or not.

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Adobe Acrobat has a really powerful document compare feature. This is a great feature in that there are times that you just can’t get  a copy of the original word processing document to run a comparison with it. One of the drawbacks of the feature, however, is that sometimes the amount of information that you get can be overwhelming.

In this case, getting too much information can be almost as bad as not getting enough information. Fortunately, Adobe has come up with a way to modify the types of information that you see when you compare documents.

The information can be found here at The PDF Developer Junkie Blog. The author has written a JavaScript that will add a menu item that allows you additional control over what you see in the document compare screens.

The great thing is that you really don’t have to understand what he is talking about in order to use the script. Simply follow his step by step instructions to download the script and add another feature to your Acrobat menu.

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I recently had an article published in Chicago Lawyer Magazine. The topic is using Adobe Acrobat in your legal research. I know, an Acrobat article from me. What a surprise. However, if you are curious about what I have to say, you can find the article here.

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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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