PDF for Lawyers

Bookmarking Tip for Acrobat

Knowing how to create bookmarks is important if you are going to efficiently navigate your PDFs.  This one of many reasons why you need the full version of Acrobat.  I talked to a patent attorney in Kansas the other day who reviews information from the Patent office that is made available in PDF format. But, he only has the basic Adobe Reader.  He obviously spends a lot of time navigating PDFs, and often returns to the same PDF later on to find information he has reviewed previously.

This is a person who needs the full version of Acrobat.  And he needs to learn how to bookmark pages so he can quickly return to them later on.  The first thing you should do when you get Acrobat (after setting up your default viewing preferences) is to learn the shortcut for creating a bookmark. In Windows it's CONTROL + B, and in Mac it's COMMAND + B.

Now here's the really cool bookmarking tip that you can use PDF you are in is text-based (i.e. 'searchable').  You'll know it's searchable if you can highlight a word or sentence of text.  So, let's say you've highlighted a passage and you want to tag that as a bookmark.  If you highlight it and then use the shortcut for creating a bookmark Acrobat will create the bookmark and name it with the text that you highlighted.

I'm not sure if this works in older versions of Acrobat, but I can say that it definitely works in Acrobat 9.0.  One way I use it is when I create a PDF of, say, a complaint or other document that has headings.  I can quickly go through the document and highlight each heading and create a bookmark.  Then when I open that document later on my bookmarks are essentially a table of contents of the main parts of that document.

Paperless depositions

I don't use paper in depositions.  If I'm taking the deposition I cheerfully agree to have the deposition held in my opponent's office, asking him or her to make sure to have the case documents available and organized by bates-number.   If you can't count on an attorney to have lots of paper what can you count on?

I have my deposition notes set up in an outline on my computer.  When I get to a place that calls for me to talk about a certain document I inform my opposing counsel what the document bates-number is, and ask him to show it to the witness.  I have all the documents bookmarked in Acrobat.  It takes me about 3 seconds to get to the document, and I make good use of the time it takes my opponent to pull the document and show it to the witness.  I have notes superimposed on the PDF and I examine those and get ready to frame my questions.  At the end of the deposition I don't offer any documents as exhibits.  If opposing counsel asks me why I'm not doing that I tell him that the bates-numbers (which I announced on the record before starting my questions about each document) constitute sufficient reference.

If I'm attending a deposition it's even easier.  When a document is offered I ask what the bates-number is and I just pull it up, much more quickly than if I were to wait for it to be handed over.  Plus I have my PDF notes superimposed on my copy which helps me quickly figure out the relevance of the document to my theory of the case.   And of course I can add more notes on the fly if I want to.  I also bookmark the document and indent it under a main bookmark labelled for the deposition in question.  So when the deposition is over I have a listing of all the documents that were referenced in that meeting.

It's not as high-tech as this paperless deposition system, but it doesn't need to be.  Often the best solution is the simplest one, and I think that's true for Adobe Acrobat.  It does a lot of things pretty darn well, and since I use it all the time I'm very familiar with its organization.  Next time you take a deposition consider how much smoother it could be if you didn't have to deal with paper. 

Of course, if you have a deposition like this one it wouldn't matter.

Bookmarks - Navigation aid & Reminder

A PDF Bookmark is a powerful navigation tool, but a lot of people don't seem to use bookmarks. That's a big mistake. 

I keep all my case pleadings in a PDF document, and I bookmark each pleading separately so I can navigate to it quickly.  If the pleading has Exhibits or associated documents I bookmark each of those documents and then nest the bookmark under the main bookmark for that pleading.  The bookmarks can be moved around if you want.  And that's a powerful benefit.

Let's say you have your pleadings scanned in chronologically, which makes sense.  Discovery requests are issued in, say, January of 2007 but are not responded to until March.  Between then you've had some other pleadings come in.  But you want the response bookmark to be nested below the original request.  First, that makes sense since the response is associated with the request.  But it also makes sense as a visual aid that helps you see which responses are outstanding.  Take a look at this short movie clip and you'll see what I mean (the third bookmark doesn't have a nested bookmark, which tells me there is no response to that request).

Using Bookmarks to open files and other tricks

One of the unknown features of the Bookmark feature in Acrobat is that you can use it to open a file. Just go to an existing bookmark and right-click (Windows) or Ctrl-click (Mac). Then pick "Properties" and you see a tab for "actions" and one of the choices is "Open File." So now you see that you can use a bookmark to open a file, or a bunch of other things (i.e. open a weblink etc.).

Now, why would you want to do that? Good question, which my co-author Dave Fishel recently explained in an online seminar.

You could use this technique to great advantage if you wanted to create a blank PDF document that simply had links to other key documents, files, web-pages, images, or whatever. Think "trial notebook." And the best part of this trick is that the links are hierarchical, which means if you have the Master PDF and all of its other files in a group of folders you can move the entire group to a new location and the links will still work. In other words, the links are relative links. Pretty cool, huh?

Printing Your Bookmarks

Bookmarks are wonderful navigational tools for PDF documents, and they are also a great way of organizing your documents. But what if you want to print out a list of the bookmarks you have in a document? Well, there are a couple of ways.

One way is with a plug-in like the one created by IntelliPDF, which costs $99. The nice thing about this plug-in is that you can select just certain bookmarks, or all of them, if you want.

Another, albeit more complicated, way that supposedly works with Acrobat 5.0 is this: (1) Open the File menu, point to Batch Processing, and click List all Bookmarks. If that option isn't available, you'll need to copy that SEQU file from the Acrobat installation CD and put it in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\Acrobat\Sequences\ENU. (2) When prompted, select the PDF for which you want to print bookmarks.
The batch sequence will read through the PDF and create a new PDF that lists all the bookmarks in the original. (3) Print the new PDF that the sequence created.

Printing a document's Bookmarks

Bookmarks are the most fundamental way of navigating through a PDF document. You need the full version of Acrobat to create Bookmarks. Bookmarks are displayed in a side-panel on the left of your document view window. When you click on a Bookmark you are instantly transported to the the bookmarked page.

How do Bookmarks come into play for attorneys? Lots of ways, but here is one scenario that comes up a lot in a litigation practice.

The usual drill for a paralegal to scan a batch of discovery documents in as one lump file and then bookmark the beginning pages of each document. Having one lump file makes it easier to scroll through a bunch of documents (i.e. if you scanned each document in as a separate file then you'd have to be opening new files for every document you wanted to look at, and no one has the patience for that). And bookmarking the first page of each document makes it easy to navigate to a document that you need to look at.

So let's say you've scanned in a bunch of documents and you have lots of nicely organized bookmarks that list the names of the documents that you have scannned in. What happens if you want to print out a list of your bookmarks? That's how you would get an inventory of the documents that you have in that file, right?

Well, unfortunately, you can't generate a list of PDF bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat without a third-party plug-in program. I don't understand why Acrobat doesn't have this feature. But if you're interested in a third-party plug-in, AppliGent has a $99 program called APGetBookmarks that dynamically gets a list of all bookmarks within PDF documents and reports them back in text form. The plug-in will do the following:

- list the Bookmarks in the PDF document in a Numbered and Indented Hierarchy
- list the corresponding Page Numbers for each Bookmark
- list the Full Path in the Document Hierarchy for Each Bookmark,
- and more...

You can get more info and run an online demo at this link.

Image Solutions has ISIToolBox that does all kinds of things with PDFs and includes a utility to export bookmarks and/or links into a comma separated value (CSV) file data format, which can be imported either into a spreadsheet application or word processor. Unfortunately, this program is quite pricey, at $750. You can get more info and run an online demo for that product at this link.

The down-and-dirty solution to the problem of needing to print out a list of the documents would be to tag the first page of each document with a "Note Comment." Acrobat allows you to print out a summary of the comments, and you can tailor the printout to include only certain comments (i.e. only the Note Comments). But the best solution is probably to use a separate program like CaseMap to keep track of your documents. CaseMap helps you keep track of more than just documents, and really is an indispensible program. In fact, CaseMap has a plug-in that allows you to integrate your PDF documents into a case database in CaseMap. But that is a topic for another day.