PDF for Lawyers

Solve mobile email hassle

Do you wish that you could send email from any device at any location? Without changing settings, or switching to web-based email? Do you get frustrated when you have to send email while you're on the road? Well, then check out SMTP.com. This is probably the answer you've been looking for.

A mobile lawyer is a paperless lawyer

Whenever I talk to lawyers about switching to a digital workflow system I always get the same question: what's the best way to switch? The answer: all at once. Next question. What's the second best way?

Ah, excellent question. And the answer is: just work on becoming a mobile lawyer. The more mobile you are the less dependent on paper you'll become (after all you aren't going to be very mobile if you have to drag tons of paper around with you). I was pretty mobile before Katrina pushed me into that extreme form of mobility known as nomadism. But Katrina was good because it forced me to think more deeply about how to diminish my reliance on paper, and anything else that would keep me tethered to a specific location.

One thing that is hard to escape from is your physical mailing address. You pretty much have to have one, and that means your mail will go to that location. And then you have to figure out how to retrieve it from a distant place. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have your mail sent to a place that scanned it and sent it to you by email? Well, turns out there is such a place. It's called Earth Class Mail.

You have to choose to have mail delivered to one of 18 regional P.O. centers. For about $10 per month they'll scan up to 35 envelopes and email you the image. You then decide if you want them to shred the envelope and its contents, or open it and scan the paper. You get up to 50 pages scanned for the $10 monthly fee and then pay .25 per page after that. There is a corporate package, and soon they will be adding the ability to electronically cash checks.

Obviously, this is not worthwhile for the average person. But if you are on a long trip, or if you don't plan to spend time in any one place for very long this is the way to get your paper mail.

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.

Going paperless at home

The New York Times has an interesting article about the mounting trend of people digitizing their home information. Over at the Lifehacker blog the editors have asked their readers how far they've come in digitizing their home information. Some interesting comments there, and I encourage those of you who are interested in the "Paperless Evolution" to read those comments or add your own.

Debating the Docu-Centric Paradigm

[Editor's note:  Tom O'Connor is Director of the Legal Electronics Document Institute, and is quite knowledgeable about digital documents.  He's agreed to join this blog and to occasionally post thoughts about the state electronic documents in the legal field.  His first post appears below]

This past Tuesday I got together with Ernie and Al Robert (another techno attorney here in New Orleans) for pizza and a spirited discussion about the shift away from single page TIFF document capture and review to a more docu-centric approach. (I know what you’re thinking but hey, college football season is over and Mardi Gras is still 3 weeks away so just don’t say it ok?) The three of us all agreed that this paradigm shift is not only inevitable but also offers the best framework for small and medium size firms trying to implement a paperless workflow system.

No big surprise there: all three of us have been saying exactly that independent of each other for some time now. What was surprising was that I had been engaged in exactly the same discussion earlier that day with a company working with AmLaw 100 law firms. John Turner is a Senior VP and CTO at Anacomp, the San Diego based enterprise document capture and management corporation that last year purchased CaseLogistix, the legal lit support software company. CaseLogisitx (CLX for short) uses the PDF format for its document images and John had spent the day speaking with a CaseLogistix partner which scanned to the single page TIFF format and was having trouble understanding how to get that data into CLX. More important, they were struggling with why the docucentric approach was preferable.

As John (tried to) explain it to his somewhat befuddled colleague “The page-centric paradigm has really been inherited from the handling of single pieces of paper. This led to pricing by page as well as Bates numbering and now most, if not all, of today’s review platforms have a page centric data model. This does allow Counsel to refer to a Bates number and find an individual page that everyone agrees is the same document.But this complicates native file review and also adds considerable cost to the end to end process.” “To fully understand why, I need to go back to the start of the discovery process at what the EDRM project calls the “Processing” stage. The steps in this stage are: (1) Data is received from the customer; (2) This data is culled and deduplicated; (3) The metadata is extracted; (4) The text is extracted; and (5) The document is TIFFed.(This can be done as single page or multi page, but is usually single page). 

One consequence of this is that the relationship of the pages in the document is artificially broken.

It also breaks the relationship of an email with its attachment, or of a document with an embedded file. All of them have to be recreated in the review platform.” “You then generate a load file in a flat file format for exporting this data to an application like Summation or Concordance . A typical load file would have the original native file, the metadata, the extracted text, and TIFFs, the relationship between the TIFFs (pages in a document or attachment). Each of this would be repeated line by line for each of the single page TIFFs. No transformation of the data is necessary in loading into those platforms and so the load progresses quickly.” “But most new applications, including CLX, use a relational database which stores the data about a document in multiple tables. This allows for one to many and many to many relationships which supports advanced features and functionality, and also compatibility with external engines for tasks such as de-duping and concept searching.

To load single page TIFFs into CLX we then have to process and transform all this to cull down to one document with pointers to all the associated pages or attachments which are stored in separate tables. We are effectively processing a second time . This process is made even more wasteful in that CLX also extracts all the metadata from a native file, as well as the text, as part of the load process. It also establishes the relationship between documents and their attachments.” "What this means is that processing is again being effectively duplicated. A docu-centric data model can eliminate the text extraction and TIFF steps from the processing stage and cut the cost of processing in half.”

Good explanation but the problem for a service bureau is that they don’t want to cut costs in half so they continue to push single page TIFF as the best means of processing even though a well designed docu-centric application can still handle bundling individual pages back into documents and retrieve by a specific Bates number. So the docu-centric approach is faster, cheaper, technologically superior and easier to use. And we’re still arguing against it why? As John went on to say in his later discussion with me, the applications “…that retain the paradigm of the page and not the document will not be able to adequately support the new age of litigation.

A modern platform must be able to review native documents that are not just paper equivalents, but must directly enable review of any file that is in common use in business today.” As a document and not as a collection of hundreds or thousands of individual pages.

PDF workflow in law schools

PDFs seem to be underutilized in the legal profession.  But while lawyers are not flocking to PDFs in the way that they should, perhaps law students will start the trend.  One way this might happen is if the students start using a product called ecasebriefs, which provides digital briefs (e.g. PDF files) of cases in popular legal text books.

Let's say you are taking Civil Procedure and the professor has assigned Friedenthal, Miller, Sexton & Hershkoff as your textbook.  For $27 a student can download a PDF set of all the cases in the textbook, highlighted and with commentary balloon notes inserted by attorneys.  Since most law students have laptop computers these days this product can be a great convenience.  And law students love to buy stuff like this, or at least they did when I was in law school.

Ecasebriefs has PDF briefs for every legal textbook used in the core curriculum of law schools, and I'm betting that with low printing costs (PDF) and cheap distribution (Internet), the company will be aroudn for a long while.

I haven't seen the product firsthand, but from looking at the screenshot it seems like someone might be able to avoid buying the more expensive textbook by getting this product. In any event, the ecasebrief has a number of useful features that printed textbooks can't offer.  And if the student had the full version of Acrobat they could add their own notes and highlighting on top of the pooped out notes by the ecasebrief authors.  If many law students get used to using PDFs as part of their workflow then it will be a lot more natural for them to use PDFs in their workflow when they practice law.

E-filing coming to federal appellate courts

Howard Bashman, a pioneer law blogger who specializes in appellate practice has a great article on e-filing in federal appellate courts. As many of you know, e-filing in the federal system started in the bankruptcy courts, then moved to the district courts.

"Just as federal trial court judges were once skeptical of eliminating paper with the advent of ECF, federal appellate judges must now decide whether to require the filing of paper copies of briefs and appendices in addition to the ECF copies. Perhaps not surprisingly, federal appellate judges are, at least at the outset, even more reluctant than federal trial judges to abandon briefs and appendices filed on paper.

I agree with Howard's observation that this "reluctance is unfortunate."  Read his article.

2006 Legal Tech Trends

Dennis Kennedy's Legal Technology preditions for 2006 is a must read.   According to Dennis, the biggest trend in 2006 will be an increased emphasis on mobility and collaboration.   He also notes that

"The legal world will continue to evolve into a PDF world. PDF is becoming the standard format for e-filing, for scanning documents in electronic discovery and for safely sending documents. Adobe Acrobat will become an essential tool for lawyers."

Read the whole thing.  As usual, Dennis has his finger on the pulse of legal technology and workflow.

Monitors -- Bigger is Better

In the 80's, the newly-identified yuppie women were fond of saying "you can't be too rich, too thin, or own too many silk blouses." My computer version of that mantra is "you can't have too much RAM, too much bandwidth, or too big of a monitor." Notwithstanding the astonishing gains in processor speeds, I think those three things -- RAM, bandwidth, and monitor screen area -- have the greatest effect on productivity when working with electronic documents. Of those three, it's the monitor that has the greatest effect on our day-to-day "paperless offices."

People prefer paper -- no monitor can approach the resolution of laser toner on paper, and the lower resolution of electronic documents, along with glare and lighting issues, can add considerably to your fatigue. There are, however, things that can enhance your ability to work electronically.

First -- there is just no substitute for sheer screen area. The typical lawyer may have a 15" or 17" monitor attached to his PC. On that screen, you can see most of a single page of text -- whether it's a Word document or PDF. On a 17" monitor set to a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels, you can get two pages side by side, but the text is pretty darned small.

Look at it this way -- what if, instead of spreading books and papers out across your desk, you had to work on a single clipboard, on which you could see about two-thirds of only the topmost page? Any one of the many pages you must read can only be accessed by bringing it up to the top of the stack, where you can view two-thirds of it. How much would that slow you down? Yet we continue to work with such a system on our computer screens.

My PC at work has a 17" LCD -- it's okay. I use it because I have to. I've also used a 20" Hitachi, and a 21" Cornerstone CRT -- each about the size of a Miata -- which had the advantage of sheer screen area. I could have two full pages open side by side. That makes a big difference in getting work done. LCDs are the way to go now, though, as they are easier on your eyes due to lack of screen flicker and reduced glare.

Second -- it turns out that some operating systems just draw the text better. I have an Apple 23" Cinema Display (circa 1999) in my home office, and just turning that thing on makes me feel happy. And it's not just the size of the screen. I don't begin to understand all the technical bits, but Mac OS 10.3 (any of the OS X versions) just creates clearer screen text, which makes it a lot easier to work with electronic documents. I haven't spent much time on the newer Apple displays, but they seem like more of the same -- beautiful, big, and bright. My experiments with Linux (on an old Powerbook) and Windows tell me that the operating system does make a real difference.

Third, we are seeing what I think is a paradigm shift with regard to monitors, and it is one that will have implications for people who work in electronic documents. The "computer" is starting to disappear, and the screen -- the interface with our real work-- is gaining more prominence. In some instances, like the new iMac G5, the computer has literally disappeared into the screen. The Mac Mini seems to be another harbinger of this. PC manufacturers like Gateway and Sony are also making 1-piece computers. Even my PC at work is stuffed under my desk, and I never even look at it unless a CD won't eject. This is just the beginning -- we are only beginning to explore what it means to have a visual interface with our information -- wherever it may reside.

In conclusion, I believe that using as many high-resolution monitors as you can reasonably fit on your desk is the way to go. I could replace the processor in my PC with one that runs at double or even triple the speed, and it would not make any real difference to me. Put a 23" flat screen (or better yet, TWO of them!) on my desk, and it would make a substantial difference in how I work, and how much I get done.

Prices on LCD monitors are coming down drastically, and the productivity gains from large, multiple, LCDs are making the ROI better all the time. Do the math.

-- Dave

Courts use of Wi-Fi increasing

Read this article from The National Center for State Courts entitled Severing the Tether: the Rise of Wireless Networks (pdf file).  The push for Wi-Fi is going to catch up to our court system eventually.  First, it's becoming a technology de riguer on college campuses.  Then it will inevitably spread to coffee shops (already done) and then to airport waiting areas and office conference rooms.  One day government will figure out that this stuff is so cheap and easy to deploy it's hard to justify not making it available to the public.  Or the public will demand it.  Either way, it's coming.

Electronic Case Filing In Louisiana's Eastern District

The Eastern District of Louisiana is gearing up for the new electronic case filing system (CM/ECF). CM stands for 'case management,' (i.e. case docketing) and ECF stands for 'electronic case filing.'  Most implementations begin with the CM part, which is of benefit to the courthouse staff.  Electronic Case Filing is the thing that most lawyers are interested in.

The CM phase will be operational in the EDLA by March 1, 2005.  Electronic Case Filing should be ready sometime in the fall of 2005.  A complete list of federal courts with their status in implementing CM/ECF is available here.

PDF copies of Patents

If you want to get free PDF copies of patents filed with the USPTO, check out www.pat2pdf.com. This is a nice alternative to the USPTO's TIFF viewer system.

Good Article on Using PDFs by lawyer Dennis Kennedy

Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer and tech-guru, has a short article on using PDFs in the practice of law at the ABA Law Practice Management website: Putting PDF and Adobe Acrobat into Your Tech Toolbox. Mostly, it is a list of resource links to useful PDF sites, including this one. Be sure to also check out Dennis' Frequently Asked Questions on Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Lawyers.

Electronic transactions - why aren't there more of them?

Way back when Bill Clinton was President he signed into law legislation that was supposed to pave the way for electronic transactions. Well, Clinton's been gone for quite awhile now and I haven't noticed a big boom in electronic transactions. Why is that?

Well, for one thing, no one is really sure how it all works. The other day on a PDF E-mail discussion group someone wanted to know if it was okay to keep records in PDF form; the fellow's lawyer had told him he had to keep his documents on a WORM drive to preserve their admissibility in court (which is completely wrong). So when I say "no one is really sure how this all works" I'm including lawyers. But then lawyers aren't known for their prowess in making transactions work more smoothly.

Actually, there is another problem with all these electronic records and transactions: how they work depends on context in which they are used. But let's not make this complicated. The simple truth is that, if parties to a transaction agree that digital signatures work, then the digital signatures are okay. If they agree that the transaction will be completely electronic that's okay too. But if one of them has a penchant for paper, then that's the way the transaction will be carried out. Of course, the guy with the penchant for electronic stuff can just scan the papers and know that he is in all likelihood going to satisfy his record-keeping requirements. So the world has indeed been nicely paved for electronic transactions.

How do I know all of this? Well, for starters I asked my law professor friend Henry Gabriel. He was the reporter for the Louisiana Electronic Transactions Act (PDF), and was on the drafting committee of NCCUSL, which created the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act. He was also the reporter for the revision to the UCC Sales and Lease provisions and the chair of the UCC committee to revise the law of documents of title- which provides for electronic documents of title.

Bottom line? He knows a lot of stuff about electronic transactions. And he has graciously shared his Powerpoint presentation, which lays it all out. If you want a clear explanation of how it all this electronic transaction stuff works click here. If you don't then, by all means, keep shuffling paper.

Adobe's PDF-everywhere strategy |CNET.com

Adobe's PDF-everywhere strategy |CNET.com

An interview with Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen. Some interesting things about Adobe's goals with PDF (make documents smarter), and how the company interacts with Microsoft and Apple.

Also in passing, he mentions the philosophy of using "PDF as the file format and Acrobat Reader as the rendering platform," which is a really succint explanation of how these things fit together.

Competitors to PDF Bust a Move

There are folks out there working to turn their own technology into a standard to compete with PDF.

Adobe e-doc format under siege

Adobe's popular PDF document-sharing format faces challenges from Autodesk and Macromedia, each looking to take a bite out of the market with their own new technology.

Analysts say the rivals could be a real threat to Adobe, which attributed a major earnings boost last week to a new line of PDF products.

Yeah, well, maybe..... in their dreams.... Here's why.

First, the technologies they cite (Autodesk DWF, Macromedia Flash) are good, high quality, and useful for what they do, but they are really niche players. They are complementary to PDF, just as they are to HTML, but unlikely to replace it because they don't do quite as many things quite as well. It's a lot more likely that people will use them in conjunction with PDF than as a replacement.

Second, PDF is an "open standard." That means that, although Adobe created the technology, and is the 800-lb gorilla of PDF, anyone can design products that use the specification. That's why there is such a big "satellite" community of vendors with their own slant on the technology. Many of them are quite successful and making lots of money.

Third, the US government and an awful lot of big companies have adopted PDF as a standard and spent a ton of money adapting their business processes to it. The costs of switching would be very, very high. It's unlikely that the IRS, the federal courts, and every US agency is going to change any time soon.

Finally, it's more likely that as new technologies, like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), come along, Adobe will find a way to incorporate it into the PDF spec, just as it is doing with XML.

Jakob Nielsen, a frequent writer on Web usability, and sort of the Miss Manners of Web usability, thinks that PDF is grossly misused on the web. He has conducted studies that purport to show that PDF links "break" websites. He objects to the "page orientation" of PDF.

Three thoughts here: 1) if people actually listened to Nielsen, web sites would not suck as badly as so many do (ergo, not that many people listen to what he says); 2) unless we are all going to suddenly stop needing to print documents, having a discernable, predictable page layout is okay; and 3) PDF is used for other stuff besides web content (in fact, it's mostly used for other stuff).

So I wouldn't plan on setting up a law-office FlashPaper workflow any time soon.
-- Dave --