PDF for Lawyers

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.