Proving PDF documents in court

Dunno if this is helpful, but someone asked this question on Google Answers and here is the resulting response.

Comments

[Clint Pullin]

Reviewing the original post about converting original documents into pdf files, the post seems to have confused the work product of an attorney or an attorney's representative and the rules of evidence applicable to documents sought to be admitted in court. The applicable federal or state rules, and related caselaw, will inform a person on evidence admission. The work product should generallly be protected, but maintained in such a way that detailed testimony can be presented on the use of electronic information, security of the data, wysiwyg truthfulness, etc.

[Clint Pullin]

The original post seems to relay the attorney's confusion over work product compared to admissible evidence. The applicable federal or state rules of evidence will inform the reader of how courts will admit evidence. The use of pdfs, tiffs, or any other file format as part of an attorney's work product would not matter to the court unless a discovery dispute raised questions about data integrity. Then, the document custodian would need to provide detailed testimony about the records management system from start to finish in order to have a chance of presenting creditable evidence. FWIW, I much prefer the search functionality of pdfs over tiffs since I don't have to code documents into any kind of proprietary system in order to retrieve relevant documents in pdf format.