PDF for Lawyers

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.

Two really useful shortcuts in Acrobat

Spending the time to learn shortcuts will help you get the most out of any software, and that’s especially true of Acrobat. Here’s a quick tip that makes use of two important shortcuts.

Let’s say you have to review one big PDF with a lot of pages. Maybe it’s is one long document, or maybe it’s a PDF that needs to be broken up into a bunch of smaller documents. But let’s assume it’s the kind of document where you really just need to quickly blast through it quickly, scanning it like Evelyn Woods. The first thing you want to do when you review a document is get rid of the distractions. You can make it so Acrobat takes up your full screen, but then the toolbars and menus would still be distracting. 

No, what you want is to make your computer screen show only the document itself. 

You could go to the VIEW menu and then select FULL SCREEN MODE, but this is a post about using shortcuts. What is the shortcut for ‘FULL SCREEN MODE’? (Go navigate to VIEW > FULL SCREEN MODE and you can see for yourself). The shortcut is some key and the letter L. Which key? Depends on if you’re using a Mac or a PC.  On a Mac the key combo is COMMAND + L; on a PC it’s CONTROL + L. Why the letter L? Who knows, but let’s say it stands for ‘large’. That will help you remember.

So when you blank out the distractions and you start hitting the down arrow key to go page by page, what do you do when you come upon a page you want to mark? You use the bookmark shortcut. What is the bookmark shortcut? It’s the same key we used before (depending on if you have a Mac or a PC) and the letter B. That’s pretty easy, right? B is for ‘bookmark.’

And the cool thing is you can apply the bookmarks while you’re in full screen mode. If you didn’t know the shortcut you’d have to leave full screen mode just to create a bookmark, which would make it impossible to effectively use the full screen mode. Now you know the secret to quickly reviewing a document. Pop into full screen mode with Command + L (or Control + L if you have a PC), and then use the same key with ‘B’ to create bookmarks. Once you’ve bookmarked the entire file you can go back and quickly rename the bookmarks or add additional commentary.

Incidentally, the View Full Screen command also works in Adobe Reader too. Unfortunately you can’t create bookmarks in Adobe Reader, though.

 

Capturing web pages with Acrobat

These days a lot of litigation requires lawyers to capture information on a website, or a web page. If you learn about online information damaging to the other side of your case you should capture it immediately. The easiest way to do this is to just go to the page in question, and 'print to PDF.'  If you have Acrobat I'm sure you know how to do this.

Let's say you want to capture the information on my law firm website (actually a blog), which is at www.svensonlaw.com. You can pull that up in your browser and then select 'print to PDF'.  The result will be a capture the output on the home page. Now you have to do this for each separate page on my site, which has 5 separate pages. Not a big deal, maybe, because my site isn't that big.

But even with a small site like mine it's a lot more efficient to simply direct Acrobat to capture the entire site.  Here's how you do that in Acrobat 9 (Standard or Pro). First go to ADVANCED > WEB CAPTURE > CREATE PDF FROM / APPEND WEB PAGE. Then you'll get a dialogue box like this.

Don't click on the CREATE button. That would yield only a capture of the home page, which is too limited. You want to capture the entire site, so click on the button to the left of the text in the lower left that says 'Capture Multiple Levels'. Once you do that you'll get a dialogue box like this:

Don't click just yet. You'll notice that here the dialogue box is set to only capture the first level. You want to get the entire site, so click that box.

The next dialogue box will warn you of the perils of trying to capture an entire site, which is reasonable because I'm sure some lawyers out there might think that they can use this tool to capture the CNN.com site. That would take a really long time and create a really large file, if it worked at all. And that's what the next dialogue box is trying to make you aware of.

So just click YES and the process will start. Just to give you an idea of how long it might take to capture a small website, it took about a minute to capture the 5 pages on my law firm website.  The result of the capture is a nicely bookmarked PDF file, which looks like this:

This is obviously much better than creating separate PDF files for each page by using the 'print to PDF' function. If you did that you'd have to merge the files into one file, which is easy to do but does involve a whole extra step. With the web capture function you can be sure that you're getting the entire site (or however many levels you choose to capture).

Granted, there are times you may have to resort to simply 'printing to PDF,' such as when you try to capture certain sites that are password protected (e.g. Facebook pages). But you can always try the web capture at one or two levels and see what happens, and then fall back on the 'print to PDF' function if you're not capturing the pages using the web capture.

As I mentioned earlier, this feature is part of Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro.

The disadvantages of locked PDFs

One thing that makes PDFs superior to TIFFs as a format for storing digital documents is PDFs ability to incorporate security features.  Many lawyers aren't aware of the full features of Adobe Acrobat.  Of course, you password protect a document so that it can't be opened, but that's not something you're likely to do if you produce PDFs as part of the discovery process.  However, did you know that you can also lock down particular features and prevent the user of a PDF from printing?  And you can also prevent the user from 'copying and pasting.'   

If you are thinking that this would be a great thing to do when producing documents in litigation, think again.  The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (and many state rules) specify that documents must be produced in native form, or 'in a reasonably usable form' (which means a searchable form).  So producing 'locked down' PDFs is probably not a good idea.

The defendants in Mack v. HH Gregg, Inc. found this out the hard way as the excellent discussion in this blog post reveals. Now, there are legitimate reasons you'd want to lock down a PDF that wouldn't impair the other sides legitimate use of the PDFs.  For example, what if you want to lock down the Bates-numbers that you imposed on the PDFs that you're producing and nothing else?  If you want to do that check out this article from the wonderful blog Acrobat for Legal Professionals.

Deposition notices = junk mail?

Recently, it was revealed that the carbon footprint of junk mail is equivalent to 480,000 cars.  I reflected on this dispiriting fact while opening my office mail the other day.  Especially the bulging envelope with two deposition notices.  While there are steps you can take to reduce the volume of junk mail you receive it's hard for a devotee of paperless like me to ward of paper deposition notices.  Still, it is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

The case that spawned the offending paper is based in federal court, which means that the notices aren't even filed in the court.  If they were required to be filed, they would have to be filed in electronic format and the service would be accomplished electronically.  If only lawyers knew how to scan print the documents to PDF and send them by email!

Well, actually, they should!  Again, because we're talking about a federal court case the lawyers are converting their pleadings to PDF when they file electronically.  So why aren't they sending the notices as PDF attachments to an email? Probably because they don't think the rules allow for it.  So, how about we amend the rules?  

But before we go off on a discussion about that, how about this idea:  How about if attorneys in federal court cases agree from the inception of a case that they'll accept service of deposition notices by email?  Or --better yet-- how about if we send the notices as calendar appointments which can quickly 'accepted' and moved into an electronic calendar?  Doesn't this make perfect sense?

I'll bet that it does to some attorneys, and not so much to many others.  Those that have monthly billing quotas are probably snorting at the mere suggestion of these notions.

Producing paper copies of emails - Warning!

The new Federal Rules deal with how 'electronically stored information' must be produced. Emails are the quintessential example of ESI. A recent decision from a Kansas federal court dealt with a plaintiff's complaint about document production in an employment dispute. The plaintiff requested emails, but did not specify the form of production. The defendant produced the relevant emails in paper form, after having them converted to PDFs. The magistrate ruled that this was impermissible and ordered the emails to be produced again in 'native format.'

Let me repeat a key point: the plaintiff did not specify what format she wanted the the email production to be in. And this didn't matter. Why?

Because the new rules say that, if the requesting party doesn't specify the form, then it must be produced in either (1) native format, or (2) "a reasonably usable form." The federal magistrate found that converting the emails to paper was not production in "a reasonably usable form." In doing so, there was some discussion about how paper can't be searched in the way an electronic file can be searched:

"[i]f the responding party ordinarily maintains the information it is producing in a way that makes it searchable by electronic means, the information should not be produced in a form that removes or significantly degrades this feature."

This begs the (unanswerable) question: would the result have been different if the defendant had produced text searchable PDFs?

After close reading of the case, I would argue that it well might have. The only reason to prefer the 'native format' of the emails would be to examine metadata, which in most cases isn't really all that useful. The judge didn't mention metadata and I get the sense that the plaintiff didn't make that argument (perhaps because she had a better argument). In any case, it's safe to say that if you are asked for emails in a federal court case you should be wary of producing paper copies. If you do, and plaintiff complains, then you might be required to produce the emails again in native format.

Producing documents is always frustrating. But having to do it twice for the same request is supremely frustrating. So, if you want to produce emails in other than native format, you should—at a minimum—produce text searchable PDFs.

(More coverage of the White case here)

TIFFs versus PDFs - which is preferable?

Back in 2000 when I started becoming more intense about scanning documents I was told by many people that TIFF files were preferable to PDFs, mostly because the business-class scanners were configured for TIFF output. Once I discovered PDFs, I found them preferable in many ways. Still, there are many people (mostly vendors) who argue for TIFFs. The other day I was sent a white paper comparing the two formats, and I think it nicely sums up the advantages and disadvantages of each format.

The quick and dirty conclusion: PDFs can do a lot more than TIFFs (security, searchability etc), but sometimes PDF files wind up being a little bigger. But, with digital storage costs plummeting each year, this is not a major deficit. Obviously, I prefer PDFs. Otherwise this blog would be called "TIFFs for Lawyers."

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.

States adopt E-Discovery rules

Here's a list of the states that have adopted E-discovery rules.  This list is pretty long, and will undoubtedly be growing rapidly.

Controversy over the "Send to FedEx" feature in Acrobat

Last week we reported on the "Send to FedEx/Kinkos" function in Acrobat 8.1.  Now it appears that, because of complaints by printing organizations, Adobe and FedEx will no longer partner to offer this feature.  In October, when Adobe releases new versions of Acrobat and Reader, the 'Send to FedEx/Kinkos" link will be removed, although a separate version of Reader will be available from FedEx that will contain this functionality.  Hopefully, FedEx/Kinkos will also create a plug-in for Acrobat that enables the "Send to" feature.