PDF for Lawyers

Request From An Attorney

Here's an request that was posted on the LitSupport Listserv this morning in the midst of a thread talking about how uninformed attorneys are about e-documents.  I referred the poster to Rick Borstein but thought this group would find it, well ...interesting.

Can someone recommend a whitepaper, article or book which will clearly reinforce the following statement:

"converting a document such as a contract from a MS Word document into a
.PDF eliminates metadata concerns associated with the MS Word version of the
document."

I am working with a law firm currently where one attorney will only convert to .PDF, print, and re-scan
the document to another .PDF before she will transmit it anywhere.

10 delicious links

A mobile lawyer is a paperless lawyer

Whenever I talk to lawyers about switching to a digital workflow system I always get the same question: what's the best way to switch? The answer: all at once. Next question. What's the second best way?

Ah, excellent question. And the answer is: just work on becoming a mobile lawyer. The more mobile you are the less dependent on paper you'll become (after all you aren't going to be very mobile if you have to drag tons of paper around with you). I was pretty mobile before Katrina pushed me into that extreme form of mobility known as nomadism. But Katrina was good because it forced me to think more deeply about how to diminish my reliance on paper, and anything else that would keep me tethered to a specific location.

One thing that is hard to escape from is your physical mailing address. You pretty much have to have one, and that means your mail will go to that location. And then you have to figure out how to retrieve it from a distant place. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have your mail sent to a place that scanned it and sent it to you by email? Well, turns out there is such a place. It's called Earth Class Mail.

You have to choose to have mail delivered to one of 18 regional P.O. centers. For about $10 per month they'll scan up to 35 envelopes and email you the image. You then decide if you want them to shred the envelope and its contents, or open it and scan the paper. You get up to 50 pages scanned for the $10 monthly fee and then pay .25 per page after that. There is a corporate package, and soon they will be adding the ability to electronically cash checks.

Obviously, this is not worthwhile for the average person. But if you are on a long trip, or if you don't plan to spend time in any one place for very long this is the way to get your paper mail.

Paperless depositions

I don't use paper in depositions.  If I'm taking the deposition I cheerfully agree to have the deposition held in my opponent's office, asking him or her to make sure to have the case documents available and organized by bates-number.   If you can't count on an attorney to have lots of paper what can you count on?

I have my deposition notes set up in an outline on my computer.  When I get to a place that calls for me to talk about a certain document I inform my opposing counsel what the document bates-number is, and ask him to show it to the witness.  I have all the documents bookmarked in Acrobat.  It takes me about 3 seconds to get to the document, and I make good use of the time it takes my opponent to pull the document and show it to the witness.  I have notes superimposed on the PDF and I examine those and get ready to frame my questions.  At the end of the deposition I don't offer any documents as exhibits.  If opposing counsel asks me why I'm not doing that I tell him that the bates-numbers (which I announced on the record before starting my questions about each document) constitute sufficient reference.

If I'm attending a deposition it's even easier.  When a document is offered I ask what the bates-number is and I just pull it up, much more quickly than if I were to wait for it to be handed over.  Plus I have my PDF notes superimposed on my copy which helps me quickly figure out the relevance of the document to my theory of the case.   And of course I can add more notes on the fly if I want to.  I also bookmark the document and indent it under a main bookmark labelled for the deposition in question.  So when the deposition is over I have a listing of all the documents that were referenced in that meeting.

It's not as high-tech as this paperless deposition system, but it doesn't need to be.  Often the best solution is the simplest one, and I think that's true for Adobe Acrobat.  It does a lot of things pretty darn well, and since I use it all the time I'm very familiar with its organization.  Next time you take a deposition consider how much smoother it could be if you didn't have to deal with paper. 

Of course, if you have a deposition like this one it wouldn't matter.

Digital Workflow - Backup online (forget CD-ROMs)

As you transition to a digital workflow you'll begin to appreciate the value of having all of your data in an easily transportable and easily accessible form.  The first question I usually get when I explain to people the benefits of converting all of their paper to digital form is: "what happens if my digital data gets destroyed?"

First, paper is a lot easier to destroy than digital data but that's a topic for another post. You obviously do want to take steps to protect your digital data. For a long time backup systems were hard to use.  The proper protocol always calls for the backup to be stored 'offsite,' somewhere far from the original.  It doesn't do any good to have a backup in the office when it catches fire, right?

Online backup promises to solve the 'offsite' issue, but for years it was too expensive, or too hard to pull off.  But now, it's gotten to the point where it's very affordable and --frankly-- it's the best choice.  A company called Mozy offers a great solution that I highly recommend.  You can store up to 2 GBs on their system for FREE!  Their system works with Macs and PCs.  If you want to store more than 2 GBs (and most people will) then you can get the basic system for only $4.95 per month.

I don't know about you, but I think that $60 per year for unlimited online backup is ridiculously cheap.  If you are going to scan your documents and throw away the original paper then you'll need a backup system.

Going paperless at home

The New York Times has an interesting article about the mounting trend of people digitizing their home information. Over at the Lifehacker blog the editors have asked their readers how far they've come in digitizing their home information. Some interesting comments there, and I encourage those of you who are interested in the "Paperless Evolution" to read those comments or add your own.

But I don't want to scan my yellow pad...

Many lawyers have a legal pad dedicated to each client file, as opposed to using one pad to record notes from all matters.   But if you gravitate toward a paperless work flow then you need to electronically capture all of these notes. Sure, you could use a scanner. That's obvious.  But maybe the scanner seems like a hassle for some reason.  Are there any other options?

Well consider this: with Acrobat it's easy to import pictures into a pdf document.  So if you have a decent camera phone (e.g., greater than 1 megapixels) or an old digital camera sitting in a drawer, then an alternate solution may be close at hand.  At the end of the day take a picture of each page of your notepad, and then later import the pictures in the PDF file for the appropriate case (presumably one called "Attorney Notes").  Or email them to your secretary and have her do it. Or just dump the .jpgs into an Attorney notes folder named by date.  There are lots of variations that you can work out for yourself.

You can use this trick for magazine articles, whiteboard sessions, or other chunks of information that are not easily scanned.  In fact, some people use their camera phones to take pictures of things that they want to be reminded of  later (e.g. window shopping ideas etc.).  The point is that your cameraphone or digital camera can be part of your digital workflow too.  If you want it to, that is.

Creating PDFs - a reader's suggestion

One of our readers emailed to express his appreciation of a tool called PrimoPDF.  He gave permission to reproduce part of that email, which explains why he likes this product.

We use Adobe Reader 8.1, but it does not have many bells and whistles.  We use the 2003 versions of MS Word and Outlook.  I like the PrimoPDF because it is easy.  Once it is downloaded, PrimoPDF shows up as one of the printers on the “print” dialog box.  You choose it as your printer and “print.”  It then asks for the output file name, and it gives you 4 choices for output quality ranging from “Screen” (basic) to “Prepress” (best), plus a custom option.  For my purposes, I use the “screen” quality, which prints out as clearly as most attorneys would ever need.  There are other bells and whistles which I haven’t needed yet.  The whole process takes maybe 15 to 20 seconds.  I use it to save documents and e-mails that I don’t want to be changed.

PrimoPDF is a free download, and works with Windows Vista.  Of course, I always recommend that lawyers spring for the full version of Acrobat 8.0, which allows PDF creation as well as many other things such as bates-stamping and document redaction (to name just a few things).  It's not free, but you can download a fully functioning version and try it for 30 days.

If you can't afford Acrobat, and need to convert documents to PDF, then PrimoPDF is a good place to start.  Start archiving all of your outgoing letters to PDF.  Eventually, you'll want to get a scanner and the full version of Acrobat, but at least you've taken one important step on the road to becoming completely paperless.

Do you have any good tips on using PDFs in your practice that you'd like to share with other readers of this blog?  Well send 'em in, and we'll post those tips next Friday.  Thanks!

Acrobat 9 coming soon?

Just when you thought that Acrobat 8.0 reigned supreme comes word that Adobe is gearing up to release a new version.  Acrobat 8.0 represented a major upgrade to legal professionals, with features like bates-stamping, document redaction, and meta-data removal.  What new features will the new version bring?  No word for now, but you can sign up for the Adobe Pre-Release program to get some advance warning.  Sounds like the new version will be released this coming year, but not for at least a couple of months. Of course, that's a completely uneducated guess.

Digital workflow for lawyers

I'll be speaking to the Lawyers Computer Group on 'Digital Workflow' in a couple of weeks.  The talk is about about using scanners and Adobe Acrobat to streamline your law practice (so you don't feel like this poor guy).

The presentation is at noon on February 13th in the Pan-American Life Bldg, downtown New Orleans.  To register contact Michael Goldblatt at 504-841-0900, or by email (michaelgoldblatt[at]aol.com).  The registration fee is $15.

The written materials are pretty spare; I'll be posting links relevant to the talk here.  I think you have to register by February 8th if you want a spot.  Hope to see some of you there.