PDF for Lawyers

Why would a lawyer embed a file into a PDF?

Today we’re going to talk about attaching files to a PDF document, which at first seems like a weird thing that no lawyer would ever need to do. But, in a minute you’ll see that this could be incredibly useful.

Let’s say you’re a litigator and you use PDFs as your file format whenever you have to produce documents. Let’s say you have an Excel spreadsheet that’s important and so you’ve ‘printed it to PDF’ so you can manage it in your paperless document system. But, because of those pesky new procedural rules involving ESI (i.e. ‘electronically stored information’) you’re obligated to produce the Excel file to your opponent.

Now you’ve got this .xls file that you have to make sure stays connected to the PDF. So how to you keep the PDF and the .xls file associated? Easy: (1) convert the Excel file to a PDF using the ‘print to PDF’ function, and (2) embed the .xls file inside the resulting PDF.

Embedding the .xls file into the PDF is also useful from an ‘inventory control’ standpoint. What do I mean by that? Well, think about bates-stamping. One of the benefits of bates-stamping documents you produce is that you can later refer to any of those documents simply by its bates-number. If you’re at a deposition and you show a witness a document that you want to identify you can say “I’m showing you a document previously marked with bates-number D94878.”

The alternative, which most lawyers usually resort to, is to attach a paper copy of the document to the deposition. The problem with that approach is that, later on when you’re at trial and there is a question about which document was shown to the deponent (now a witness at trial), you’ll have to pull out an official copy of the deposition with the attachments to establish what document the deponent was being shown at the deposition.

From now on, forget the ancient ritual about attaching exhibits to depositions. You’re striving to be paperless (and efficient) and you can’t be hampered by mindless lawyer habits that are decades old. It’s better to bates-number documents (or files) that you might want to refer to, or that your opponent might refer to. Then you can “state for the record” what the bates-number is, and —bingo— you’ve identified the document in a way that no longer requires the use of attachments to depositions etc.

So how do you bates-stamp an Excel spreadsheet? Obviously you can’t unless you ‘print it to PDF’ and then bates-stamp it. One thing that makes PDFs great is that you can easily bates-stamp them. And now you know that you can also embed files into PDFs, which allows you to bates-stamp the container that includes the native file. So one the one hand PDFs are ‘digital paper’ that can be bates-stamped like paper, and printed out one to paper. On the other hand a PDF is also can be a container for other files. PDFs can contain embedded audio and video, not just Excel spreadsheets.

How do you embed a file into a PDF? It’s actually pretty easy. In Acrobat 8 and 9 you just look for the small grey paperclip icon at the bottom left of the PDF file you want to embed into. Here we see an example of a spreadsheet ‘printout’ that we want to attach an .xls file to.

If you click on that grey paperclip icon the following window will open up and from here you will see an ‘ADD’ button that allows you embed the file of your choice once you click it and then select the file you want to embed.

And that’s pretty much it. Remember PDFs can be both 'digital paper' and containers. And if you want to bates-stamp a file that can’t be bates-stamped under normal conditions, then put it in a PDF and bates-stamp the PDF.

 

Circumventing the silly lockdown of PDF forms

My last post was about the frustration of encountering locked down PDF forms, especially those on government sites. The government purportedly posts these forms in order to help, but as we know the government isn't always here to help.

The obvious way to get around this problem is through so-called analog hole, which to me means printing the PDF form out and then scanning it back in. At that point it's obviously stripped of any restrictions. But what if you don't have a scanner handy? I was thinking about this when I encountered the last offending form, and wondering what would I do if I had to quickly circumvent a PDF form lockdown.

Eventually I thought of a quick way: fax the form to myself at my web-based fax service. The way my service works is that I simply attach the document I want faxed to an email sent to [faxnumber]@rcfax.com. Moments later I would get a PDF of the document, but stripped of the restrictions. Faxing the form to myself is essentially like scanning it, but the scanner is the fax service.

I realize that many people don't have web-based faxing, but they should if they deal at all with faxes. Traditional fax machines are way too limited (need paper, electricity and can only print faxes where you have them plugged in). Hopefully you don't have to deal with any faxes, but odds are you do. And so I hope you have a web-based fax service. If you do then remember that it might be your only way to liberate a needlessly encumbered PDF form.

For what it's worth, I use RingCentral's fax service. It's only $7.99/month for 500 pages. You can try them out for free for a short period to see if you like the service. I don't know of any other web-based fax service that's reliable and offers a lower price.

Problems with locked down PDF forms

Recently I was asked by a client to secure a state trademark in Louisiana. I googled the phrase 'louisiana trademark application form' and discovered this PDF form on the official Louisiana Secretary of State website. I figured at that point I was a skip and a jump away from quickly filling out the form for my client.

I was wrong.

The form seems to have security that prevents me from filling out the form, which is weird. Weirder still is that I can't use the Typewriter tool to fill in the form.  And even weirder is that my Typewriter tool is completely missing. And I don't mean the option of using it is grayed out. I mean, when I open that PDF form, all evidence of the Typewriter tool's existence is gone.

Sounds like an opening scene from The X Files, doesn't it?

The first time it happened I thought I had lost my mind. But then I realized it was only happening when I opened the one PDF file. I asked Rick Borstein, who works at Adobe and publishes the excellent blog Acrobat for Legal Professionals, about this situation.  He informed me that because the typewriter tool is considered an annotation, if a document is secured to disable commenting or annotating that would disable the Typewriter tool as well.

But my Typewriter tool wasn't just disabled, it was completely gone.

As to that point, Rick said that there was a bug in an earlier version of Acrobat 9 that would make the Typewriter tool disappear sometimes, if there was more than one window open. However, that was not my situation: (1) I have the latest version of Acrobat (9.4.0), and (2) I didn't have any other windows open when trying to use the typewriter with this PDF form. If you have the same problem with the form let me know in the comments.

Even if this form is only non-functional for certain versions of Acrobat, or only under certain conditions, it raises the question of whether forms put out for public use should ever be locked down. What's the point? Government agencies provide paper forms, and have for years. Are they worried that people will alter the paper forms? Perhaps, but it's no easier to alter a PDF form. 

I suspect the problem with government forms that are locked down occurs because some bureaucrat is afraid of what might happen if the form is used in a way that the agency doesn't approve of. Meanwhile, instead of the form being easy to fill out (or type onto), it becomes almost useless.

I say 'almost useless' because there is a workaround. First, I can print the form out and scan it back in, at which point I can do whatever I want with it. But what if I don't have a scanner? Well, I have a workaround for that too. But, I'll disclose that workaround tomorrow.

Until then, good luck with your form hunting; may Providence be kinder to you than it was to me.

How to save or print search results (in Acrobat X)

Someone recently asked me if there was a way to print search results in Acrobat. I don't believe there is a way (or not an easy one) to do it in Acrobat 9, or prior versions. In Acrobat X, however, there is a new feature that allows you to save searches (see screenshot below)

As you can see, your choices are to save as a PDF or a CSV file. If you save your search results as a PDF you can then print the resulting PDF. The results look like the screenshot below, which seems to indicate that the file is listed, along with a 100 character blurb that contains the search term(s).

 

Being able to save or print search results as a PDF file is a good thing, and a welcome addition to Acrobat. So what about the export to CSV function? What would that do? Well, look at the screenshot below (or click on it to make it bigger). 

Basically, it outputs a spreadsheet of the search results, along with the blurb description. So, it seems to me that this is the optimal printout that you'd want in most cases. Like I said, this is a powerful new feature that's available for the first time in Acrobat X. So, if you want to be able to do this sort of thing you'll probably be wanting to upgrade to the new version when it comes out in a few weeks.

Do more with Acrobat; it's not that hard.

Many lawyers have a copy of Acrobat on their computer (or their assistant's computer), but they only use it for one or two things like 'printing to PDF' or bates-stamping. It's a shame that folks don't know more about all the things that Acrobat can do.

If you have Acrobat I suggest you bookmark this link, where Lori DeFurio will present 10 one minute videos entitled "10 Things I Bet You Didn't Know That Acrobat Could Do." The first one is about sending large files using Adobe SendNow. These videos are hosted on the AcrobatUsers.com site, which I also recommend highly.

Bates-Stamping Documents the easy way

Whenever I see a set of documents that has been bates-stamped by hand, I cringe.  The only place that one should be able to see that kind of thing is in a museum.  And, yet amazingly, you can see it any day of the week in a typical law practice.  What's so bad about bates-stamping documents by hand?

First, it's mind-numbingly tedious work.  Which means that the poor paralegal that has been assigned to do it is probably going to make a mistake.  Most importantly, it takes a really long time to do it by hand.  Frankly, if I was a corporate client I would add a section to my standard terms of representation stating that I refuse to pay for paralegal time associated with bates-stamping.

Let's say you have 1,000 documents to bates-stamp.  I seriously doubt that any paralegal could finish the task in less than 4 hours.  It would probably take at least a day, maybe more.  But to scan those documents would only take about an hour, maybe two hours if you had a really slow scanner.  Once you've scanned the documents it takes about 30 seconds to bates-stamp them using Acrobat 8.0.   

Using a computer to bates-stamp ensures that you don't miss any pages.  And you can tell Acrobat to shrink the borders of the page and apply the bates-stamp in the resulting white area.  This guarantees that the bates-number on every page is visible.  Also you can add text before or after the bates number, (e.g. as "2nd Production - No. 000345").  Finally, if you realize you made a mistake and included some pages that should not have been bates-stamped, you can remove the bates-stamping and start over.

So all you have to do is scan the documents first.  And this is a good thing.  Because, as an added bonus, you have not only bates-stamped your documents, but now you have them in digital form.  Then if you want to make the documents searchable (and, trust me, you want to do this) you can OCR them first.   Let me emphasize this point: OCR before you bates-stamp the documents.  Otherwise, for reasons I won't get into, you won't be able to OCR the documents later (but, as I said, you can remove the bates-stamping, OCR, and then bates again). 

In short, there's a smart way to bates-stamp documents, and a really stupid way. Why anyone would want to make someone bates-stamp documents by hand is beyond me.  Frankly, I think it should be considered a form of cruel and unusual punishment.  Apparently, though, it's not all that unusual. 

And that is really sad.

PDF Notepaper

This tool allows you to customize a PDF notepad. The creator didn't like using regular paper during meetings because he rarely needed to take notes - but he did have to jot down actions and due dates that he had to complete. Often loosing tasks in a sea of random notes, he had to begin using something better. He created an Excel file first, but then found that he wanted to be able to customize it.  This tool seemed to  help.

I've tagged this tool as an 'advanced PDF' tool, which is to say something that power users might enjoy experimenting with, but which average users probably shouldn't fool with, lest they get confused and/or frustrated.

--Ernie

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.