Posted at 12:47 PM in Digital Signatures | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 10:00 AM in Acrobat 10, Acrobat 9.0 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 03:04 AM in Acrobat 10, Acrobat 8.0, Acrobat 9.0 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 09:46 AM in Digital Signatures, iOS PDF applications, Products & Plug-ins, Workflow | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 02:30 PM in Forms, Products & Plug-ins, Workflow | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 10:53 AM in iOS PDF applications, Products & Plug-ins | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 04:38 PM in Acrobat 10, E-Discovery, Products & Plug-ins, Workflow | Permalink | Comments (0)
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;
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.
Posted at 05:47 PM in iOS PDF applications, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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