PDF for Lawyers

Give us your feedback

In an effort to better serve this blog's growing readership, I invite you to provide feedback to us by way of this brief survey.  Of course, we also welcome emails if you have specific questions or concerns.  Thanks!

New services at this site

We've added the ability to subscribe to this blog by email.  On the top left of the home page you'll see a field to enter an email address.  Also, if you have subscribed by RSS/XML in your News Aggregator, I've updated the link.  The old one still works, but I'd appreciate it if you update your feed and use the new link that is on the page now.  If you don't want to, that's okay.  The old link will keep working.  Thanks.

--Ernie

New Jersey District Court links to us

Nice to see the New Jersey District Court CM/ECF page pointing to this site. Thanks, guys!

And now for something completely different --

I'm a blogging newbie, and my personal site is "Braced for Impact." It's not about car crash law...

Newbie on Board

Thanks to Ernie for allowing me to co-author here. I've got a couple of goals. One is to help develop a real resource for attorneys, paralegals, judges, and other legal types so they can find what they need to get their jobs done quickly and easily. The other is to explore some of the possiblities for leveraging some very slick technology into an edge in your practice. My background is litigation, so that's mostly where I focus. PDF offers a LOT of possibilities.

There is some interest among lawyers in using technology to improve the quality of their practice, and the speed with which they can do their work. Most progress has been in communications, office management, and research. There are lots of people working on (and yakking about) those issues.

My question, however, has long been "how do I deal with 1 million pages of discovery, with a very limited budget, and precious little technical ability?" I don't claim to have answered that question, but I do intend to keep chipping away at.

BIG DISCLAIMER: Ernie mentioned that I currently work for FERC. Let me state clearly that there is no conceivable way that any opinion I express could reflect the policies of FERC. All opinions, ideas, and nutball schemes are my own, and there is no possibility that I would presume to speak for an agency of the federal government (or state, or local governments for that matter). So remember, this isn't FERC stuff, it isn't Fed stuff, it's just Dave stuff.

Welcome to new co-author David Fishel

I'd like to welcome a new co-author to this weblog: David Fishel. David worked for nine years as a trial attorney for US Deptartment of Justice, and for two years as a consultant for lawyers/firms (mostly trying to get people to use PDF). Lately he has been working at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the new Office of Market Oversight and Investigations. It's great to have David aboard, and I know that his presence will make this site vastly better than it has been up to now.