PDF for Lawyers

Adobe Reader now enables digital signatures

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

Bates-Stamping in Acrobat 9 Professional - Step-by-Step guide

Bates-stamping is incredibly useful for legal professionals. If you own the Professional version of Acrobat you can easily stamp a PDF document (or a batch of PDFs) with text, or sequential numbers. I put together a handy PDF guide that contains the step-by-step instructions for how to do this.

The guide won't help for Acrobat X Professional, because the initial steps are under different menus than the prior version. However, it should work for Acrobat 8 Professional. Remember, that Acrobat Standard does not have the bates-stamp feature.

Adobe no longer developing Flash plug-ins - what does this mean?

Adobe announced yesterday that it would stop developing Flash plugins for mobile browsers, which ultimately signals the end of Flash. What does this mean for Adobe? Read Dan Frommer's excellent take.

Adobe's SendNow is quite useful for lawyers

Increasingly attorneys who litigate are producing documents to opposing counsel via email as PDFs. Or, at least they try to. Then if the file size of the PDFs is too large, they resort to using some kludgy solution like Dropbox or some other online repository. Up until recently, that's what I did.

Adobe's SendNow service is a web-based tool that anyone can use for free, with some limitations. With the Free Plan are limited to file sizes of 100 Mbs, and you get a maximum total online storage of 500 Mbs. Also, recipients have 7 days to download the files. For most small productions that's enough.

The Basic Plan gives you 2 Gbs for file transfers, and up to 5Gbs of storage. But the real kicker is that it also gives you detailed tracking of when the files were downloaded and by whom. Thus, in effect, it's like having an audit trail of the fact that the documents were produced on a certain date. Litigators surely want this, and I would think that they'd happily pay the $10/month fee.

Let me make it clear how the detailed tracking works. First, the entire history of all of your productions are stored online under your SendNow account. Second, each time a recipient successfully downloads a PDF document production you are notified by email.

If you need more than 5Gbs of online storage you can opt for the Plus Plan, and get 20 Gbs of storage. You'll still be limited to productions at 2 Gbs. The price is $15/month.

The SendNow feature is built into Acrobat X, so if you have the latest version of Acrobat you can issue the production from that program without having to navigate to the web. You may still have to log into your Adobe SendNow account, but it's certainly very convenient to do this from within the program that you no doubt used to prepare your online document production.

If you don't have Acrobat X you can download the SendNow Desktop application for free, and use that program. SendNow supports many file types besides just PDFs (e.g. Microsoft Office docs, audio and video files etc.).

The only caveat about SendNow is that its use is limited to one user (since it's tied to an individul Adobe ID, and the Terms of Use don't permit several people to piggyback on that one ID). The recipients of your SendNow production do not need to have a SendNow account.

Review: Adobe Reader for iPad

My good friend Jeff Richardson has a thorough review of the new Adobe Reader app for the iPad and iPhone. I agree with everything he says. The key points in his review are;

• Reader is an easy app to learn, but it doesn't allow any annotations.
• Reader is fine, but there are other apps that do the same thing.
• Reader is free, but GoodReader is only $5 and does pretty much most of what you'd want a PDF app to do (including annotations).

Virtually every tech-savvy lawyer I know recommends GoodReader as the key PDF app that you need to have for an iPad. As David Sparks observes in his iPad at Work book, "if PDF apps were prizefighters, GoodReader would be the one with the crooked nose that has a knack for putting all its competitors, even the pretty boys, on the mat." If you want to sign PDF documents on your iPad get PDF Expert ($10).

And for more excellent tips on how to use PDFs on your iPad get David Sparks' book. It's truly an amazing resource for getting the most out of your iPad.