PDF for Lawyers

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.

Save Bates-stamp settings for future use

In the past we've [talked about how to bates-stamp](http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2011/09/the-8-page-guide-to-bates-stamping-in-acrobat-x.html) in Acrobat, and also how to set things up optimally. But once you've set up the optimal settings, it makes sense to save those settings. You can do that from the final dialogue box that appears when you're specifying where the bates-stamp will go. The screenshot below shows you that saving those settings is a simple two-step process: (1) click "Save Settings, and then (2) name the setting.

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.

Bates-stamping over several sessions - Should you do it this way?

Bates-stamping is important if you want to keep track of documents you produce. If you want to know how to do it, watch this video (go to the 13:00 mark for bates-stamping part). Bates-stamping is easy with Acrobat once you've done it a few times. And you should always bates-stamp documents that you're producing.

One common problem, though: you often don't get all of the documents that you need to produce at one time. Hence, you tend to have multiple productions. What happens then?

Well when you get the new documents, you will have already produced a range of documents that, let's say, ends in bates-number 1037. And so you'll be thinking you want to start this batch with bates-number 1038, right? Not necessarily.

If you want to keep the documents perfectly sequenced, then by all means start the next batch with number 1038. Acrobat will let you start your next bates-numbering sequence at any number you want. But, do you really have to do that? (Again, I'm not trying to convince you to alter your current method, just pointing out a workable option).

Let's say you don't care about being perfectly sequenced. How can you still make it so each document gets a unique bates-identifier? The answer is to change the prefix of the bates-identifier for each separate production. 

Here's an example of how you might have 4 separate productions, and label them slightly differently to accomplish this objective:

• HawkinsProd-01-[bates-range]
• HawkinsProd-02-[bates-range]
• HawkinsProd-03-[bates-range]
• HawkinsProd-04-[bates-range]

Obviously, you'd have duplicate numbers in the [bates-range] part of the idenfier. But, you'd still retain uniqueness of identifier based on the first part, "HawkinsProd-[diff #]."

In small cases this might make a lot of sense. Maybe you just want to quickly bates-stamp the new documents and produce them, without having to take the time to find the last bates number. Maybe you like keeping track of when the document was produced. 

Anyway, like I said, it's just something to consider. You can create a unique identifier in lots of ways, such as with a prefix or suffix. The bates-number doesn't have to be the only thing that makes the document unique. As long as you can keep track of your documents and have a unique letter/number to identify it with that's enough.

Do you know about the "headers & footers" option in Acrobat?

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the ABATechShow in Chicago, where I was asked to deliver two talks for the Paperless track. First let me say that if you've never been to TechShow you should go. Soon!

TechShow attracts over 1,000 lawyers and legal professionals who yearn for practical information on how to use technology to do a better job practicing law. The people who speak at TechShow are not only extremely knowledgeable (I'm not even in the top 10% there), but also amazingly generous with that knowledge. So it's not just the sesssions that are instructive; just hanging around the hallways or the information booth can yield some really cool tips. Which brings me to today's topic, which involves something I learned from my co-presenter, Larry Smith.

I had never paid attention to the Headers & Footers option in Acrobat, and so when Larry suggested we cover it in our talk ("Getting the Most Out of PDF Software") I was skeptical. "What practical use does that have," I asked Larry. His answer surprised me (in a good way) and maybe it will surprise you too.

First of all where do you find this option? It's the first option listed under the DOCUMENTS menu. If you select it you'll see three other options as shown in the screenshot below (click on it to make it larger).

So apparently you can add Headers & Footers or remove them, or even update them. What other option in Acrobat (frequently used by lawyers, and paralegals) does that sound like? If you answered "bates-stamping" you can advance to the next round, where the following screenshot will seem familiar:

The dialogue box for Headers & Footers looks exactly like the one for Bates-Stamping, except for at least one thing: it doesn't have an option to Insert Bates-number. So, just for comparison I have included a screenshot of the dialogue box that gets presented when you choose the Bate-stamp function:

Note that the title bar of the dialogue box says "Add Header and Footer" but then simply replaces the "add page number" button with an "add bates number" one. And that is the big clue about what the Header & Footer option is most likely to be used for.

Larry told me that he often uses it when he gets a bunch of PDFs that don't have page numbers. He can easily assemble them into one PDF, but then they still don't have page numbers. And page numbers are kind of useful, right?

Thus, the Header & Footer tool allows you to quickly add page numbers to a PDF that is lacking them. And, just as in bates-stamping, you can opt to shrink the document slightly to make sure that your pages numbers are never sitting on top of existing text (see screenshot below).

All you have to do to use this dialogue box is (1) select the "Appearance Options" and then (2) choose the "Shrink document ..." option. 

You can choose to number only certain pages, and you can start the numbering on any number you want. This simply requires that you (1) select that "Page Number and Date Format" button and then (2) select what the page range and the starting number. And as you can see from the screenshot below, you also have options for including the date, and choosing what format it will appear in.

I hope that by now you'll see how useful the Header & Footer option can by. It's probably not something that you'll use a lot, but it's definitely something that is useful in certain situations. I'm glad I learned about it. And if you are too then we both have Larry Smith to thank for this tip. Larry is the Executive Director of the Association of Legal Administrators, and former Director of the ABA group that puts on TechShow.

Next year TechShow is taking place from March 29–31st of 2012, and if I were you I'd mark that on my calendar now. Once you attend TechShow you'll understand how wonderful it is. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it: if you're a lawyer or legal professional and you work with a computer then you need to go to TechShow.

 

Extracting key pages from a PDF transcript

Recently, I needed to copy pages out of a hearing transcript and create a new PDF with just those pages. If the pages were sequential I would have known to use the EXTRACT PAGES command (under the DOCUMENT menu in Acrobat 9). But I wasn't extracting contiguous pages. I was extracting these pages: 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 64, 65, 66, 67, 88, 89, 96, 97.

Some of the pages were contiguous, but most were not. I could have extract the contiguous ranges and then assembled them into one PDF using the Combine function, but that seemed like too many steps. The optimal solution would be to pull just the pages I needed and, in one fell swoop, create a new PDF with just those pages.

I emailed Rick Borstein who works for Adobe and publishes the excellent blog Acrobat for Legal Professionals. He quickly replied that what I wanted to do was easily done using the Combine function, as he had outlined in this blog post. The key is just to pick the option for selecting pages when you get the Combine dialogue box (see below):

It's counter-intuitive that you can use the Combine function for this, but it's actually simple and works really well. And by "well" I mean "fast."

I'm sure that there are other lawyers out there who, like me, often need to extract certain pages from a document (usually a transcript). If you're one of those lawyers make sure to remember to use the Combine function as described by Rick here.

Five Best PDF tools

The excellent Lifehacker weblog asked its readers to vote for their favorite PDF utilities, and then selected the five best. Here are the results:

• Foxit - available for $129 on Windows and Linux platforms
• Preview - available for free on the Mac platform
• PDF-XChange - available for $35 for the Pro version on the Windows platform
• Adobe Acrobat - available for $299 (Standard version) on Windows and Mac platform
• Nitro PDF - available for $99 on the Windows platform

Voting among the five choices listed above was pretty close, with Foxit getting 25% of the votes and Acrobat getting almost 20% of votes. Click here for the article to see the exact tally. In my view lawyers who are serious about being paperless should get at least one copy of Acrobat Pro ($499) since it allows for bates-stamping and redaction. Acrobat Standard ($299) allows OCR and commenting and markups, as well as full-fledged page manipulation.

I'm not big on alternatives to Acrobat for many reasons, one of which is that it has all of the features I'd need and it is available for Windows computers and Macs. And the program's interface looks the same on either platform.

 

Problem when printing PDF and page comes out grey?

A loyal reader named Brian Burke emailed with what appears to be a sort of common problem: sometimes when printing a PDF the resulting page comes out grey. Brian most recently had the problem when he downloaded some government forms, and then tried to print them. But he says the problem has happened with documents that he's scanned as well.

I've had the problem, but not in the past few years. So I figured I'd google for a quick answer. I used this search term: "print pdf grey background fix" and found some articles, but most of them were behind registration walls.

One suggested fix was this: "Go to View > Color/Grayscale > Grayscale. Then right-click the table and choose B/W Settings, then Black With White Fill."

I emailed Brian my google search results, and he played around and found that this worked: "Edit > Preferences > Accessibility > enable “Replace Document Colors” > enable “Custom Color” and set page background to white and document text to black."

Have any of you had this problem? And if so perhaps you could post your solution in the comments so that the next eager seeker of solutions can (hopefully) find it on this page.

Best Acrobat keyboard shortcuts - a handy list

Having used Acrobat for many years now, I've gotten used to using keyboard shortcuts to do many PDF actions. The reason that most people don't use Acrobat more—in my opinion—is that they find it awkward to work with. In other words, they don't know the important keyboard shortcuts.

Learning the keyboard shortcuts takes a bit of time; mostly, you have to train yourself to use them instead of the mouse. But once you make these shortcuts a habit you'll find that using Acrobat is actually easier than working with paper.

I've compiled a list of the shortcuts that are most essential for what a lawyer or legal professional would use on a day-to-day basis. Download this PDF cheat sheet (right click and choose 'save as'); then learn these keyboard commands and you'll find that working with PDFs is super-easy.