PDF for Lawyers

Digital Workflow - Backup online (forget CD-ROMs)

As you transition to a digital workflow you'll begin to appreciate the value of having all of your data in an easily transportable and easily accessible form.  The first question I usually get when I explain to people the benefits of converting all of their paper to digital form is: "what happens if my digital data gets destroyed?"

First, paper is a lot easier to destroy than digital data but that's a topic for another post. You obviously do want to take steps to protect your digital data. For a long time backup systems were hard to use.  The proper protocol always calls for the backup to be stored 'offsite,' somewhere far from the original.  It doesn't do any good to have a backup in the office when it catches fire, right?

Online backup promises to solve the 'offsite' issue, but for years it was too expensive, or too hard to pull off.  But now, it's gotten to the point where it's very affordable and --frankly-- it's the best choice.  A company called Mozy offers a great solution that I highly recommend.  You can store up to 2 GBs on their system for FREE!  Their system works with Macs and PCs.  If you want to store more than 2 GBs (and most people will) then you can get the basic system for only $4.95 per month.

I don't know about you, but I think that $60 per year for unlimited online backup is ridiculously cheap.  If you are going to scan your documents and throw away the original paper then you'll need a backup system.

Creating PDFs - a reader's suggestion

One of our readers emailed to express his appreciation of a tool called PrimoPDF.  He gave permission to reproduce part of that email, which explains why he likes this product.

We use Adobe Reader 8.1, but it does not have many bells and whistles.  We use the 2003 versions of MS Word and Outlook.  I like the PrimoPDF because it is easy.  Once it is downloaded, PrimoPDF shows up as one of the printers on the “print” dialog box.  You choose it as your printer and “print.”  It then asks for the output file name, and it gives you 4 choices for output quality ranging from “Screen” (basic) to “Prepress” (best), plus a custom option.  For my purposes, I use the “screen” quality, which prints out as clearly as most attorneys would ever need.  There are other bells and whistles which I haven’t needed yet.  The whole process takes maybe 15 to 20 seconds.  I use it to save documents and e-mails that I don’t want to be changed.

PrimoPDF is a free download, and works with Windows Vista.  Of course, I always recommend that lawyers spring for the full version of Acrobat 8.0, which allows PDF creation as well as many other things such as bates-stamping and document redaction (to name just a few things).  It's not free, but you can download a fully functioning version and try it for 30 days.

If you can't afford Acrobat, and need to convert documents to PDF, then PrimoPDF is a good place to start.  Start archiving all of your outgoing letters to PDF.  Eventually, you'll want to get a scanner and the full version of Acrobat, but at least you've taken one important step on the road to becoming completely paperless.

Do you have any good tips on using PDFs in your practice that you'd like to share with other readers of this blog?  Well send 'em in, and we'll post those tips next Friday.  Thanks!

New Canon Scanners

Canon has announced two new Workgroup scanners. The DR-2010C scans in color or black and white at speeds of up to 20 pages per minute and retails for $795.  The DR-2501C scans at 25 ppm and retails for $895.  More information about the entire Canon line of workgroup scanners is available here.

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.

Open PDF's fast (Windows only tip)

From the excellent site, Lifehacker, comes this tip: "The Sumatra PDF Viewer is a tiny open source portable reader that opens PDF's in the blink of an eye." Startup time is faster than Adobe Reader, and it's free.

Tablet PCs - very useful tool for lawyers

I've had a chance to play with a Tablet PC for several months now, and I'm quite impressed.  To me, the Tablet shines in at least two arenas: (1) courtrooms, and (2) meetings.  In these settings a laptop is often acceptable (though sometimes not) but is awkward.  When you use a Tablet people tend not to notice that you have a computer in your hands, and that creates a much better social dynamic.  There are no doubt many reasons for this, but the reasons don't matter.  If you ever have the chance to test out what I'm saying you'll understand immediately.

The trick with Tablets is to learn to use the pen stylus to do your input.  Yes, I know that many of you can input faster with a keyboard (so can I).  But when you're in court, or in a meeting, you usually aren't inputting a lot of information, usually just taking notes or looking for information.  A stylus is perfectly acceptable for taking notes (remember how to use a pen and notepad?), or for pulling up information on your Tablet.

I could say a lot about the Tablet, and I plan to, but for now I'll say that if you want to learn more then visit the Tablet Lawyer blog, which is run by James Province.  He is a lawyer in Washington and knows how to use Tablet PCs in the practice of law, and his site is devoted to helping other lawyers learn how to use Tablets.

Markup PDFs without Acrobat

Marking up and manipulating PDFs is easy if you have Adobe Acrobat.  The Standard version costs a couple of hundred dollars, which I believe is worth it.  But, then, I use it a lot. If you have an Apple computer and want to explore some lower priced alternatives that are pretty good (but not as full-featured as Acrobat), check out this comprehensive article over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog which talks about two low cost products.   TUAW followed up that article with a short blurb about a tool called Skim, which is totally free.

Online to-do list - Jott.com

I'm a fan of productivity, but it seems like there a million different tools to help you keep track of stuff and get more done.  How are we going to find time to figure out which of these productivity tools are the best?  You can't, so that's why usually I ignore them.

The other day, though, my friend Dennis Kennedy asked some of his tech friends if they'd ever tried Jott.com.  I hadn't so I decided to see what it was.  I've been using it on a trial basis and I've found that it's a very useful way of keeping track of some of your 'to-do's.'    It's free right now, but I assume that if it catches on then they'll have some sort of tiered service.

To set up your Jott account you provide your email address and your cellphone number (or whatever number you are most likely to use to call-in a 'to-do.').  Once you are authenticated, you can use your phone to dicate a quick reminder.  This is useful for those times when you are driving or in some situation and you want to remember to do something.  Another way you can remind yourself is to send an email to jott@jott.com from the email address you used to register.

The power of Jott comes through when you start to notice that every day you get an email called 'Daily Jott' which has all of the reminders that you have sent.  If you want to delete one or two then you just go to your online account and do that.  But, it's nice to get a daily summary email of all the things that you want to remember.  It's also pretty cool that when you dicate your message to your phone the voice recognition software that they have converts your dictation to text (you can also listen to the voice message too if you want).

Check it out and let me know what you think (i.e. leave a comment below).

WordPerfect X3 Opens and Edits PDFs

To add to the general hubbub over the new WordPerfect release, I'll add that it not only natively creates PDFs, but it opens PDFs into WP, i.e., extracts the content of the PDF right back into WP for editing as a word processing document. If this actually works (and there is a groovy demo here -- follow the link to "Create & Edit PDFs without any additional software") it addresses one of the most persistent problems lawyers have with PDFs -- how to get the text out of the PDF file in order to use it in another document.

I'm thinking that for many people who don't have a lot of institutional inertia over software installation, WordPerfect might be worth another look. (Those in big firms and government, good luck.) And for those of you who never abandoned the WP ship, you may freely gloat in the comments.

~~ Dave

Corel's new WordPerfect release faciliates stripping out metadata

Corel has announced a new version of its WordPerfect productivity suite (WordPerfect Office X3), focusing on greater compatibility with Microsoft Office, but at a lower price. Key features for businesses are the ability to edit Acrobat PDF files, and a tool to strip metadata from Word documents.  Of course, the easiest way to strip out metadata (in most cases) is to convert a word processing or spreadsheet file and make it into a PDF.  More information on the Corel offering is available here.

Google mobile phone mail & PDFs

Google's new mobile email feature allows you to read attachments, including PDF files.  It apparently optimizes display for each type of phone.  Read more here.

PDFZone on JAWS PDF Creator

As this article at PDFZone explains, Global Graphics has been in the PDF-software business for a long time. JAWS PDF Creator is a stable, mature product that provides a lot of functionality. Its roots in the publishing industry make it interesting for the legal market, since we are publishers.

Creator does one type of tasks -- make PDFs -- but provides a couple of ways to go about it.

Jaws PDF Creator gives you several ways to approach the conversion task. The easiest is probably to "print" to a PDF, the program using the familiar technique of mimicking a printer driver. You select the Print command in your application and select Jaws PDF Creator as your "printer," and when you click the OK button, the program creates your PDF file. In the print dialog box, you get a modest selection of controls, but behind one—your choice of Configuration—lurk the myriad options that control how a PDF can be created.

A Configuration, in the program's parlance, is an output profile (Acrobat would call it Default Settings) that collects a potentially mind-boggling array of settings under a single name. These stack up well against what Acrobat Distiller has to offer. It's easy to create new Configurations and to base new ones on existing ones.

It doesn't include a PDF viewer (presumably since every computer on the planet has Acrobat Reader), and if you want to edit, comment or concatenate your creations, you'll have to get the sister product, JAWS PDF Editor. I've experimented with both programs and they are stable and full-featured. (And, alas, the current version available only for Windows, although a Mac version is imminent.)

PDFZone's conclusion --

Jaws PDF Creator doesn't pretend to compete with Acrobat. It doesn't offer Acrobat Standard's collaborative tools, and it doesn't offer the tables and forms tools of Acrobat Pro. If you want PDF editing tools, you'll have to pony up another $59 for a copy of Jaws PDF Editor. But for the task of turning your documents into PDFs for office, Web or prepress use, it stacks up very well indeed.

I think that the prices quoted in the PDFZone article are full retail -- JAWS PDF Creator and Editor are offered together as JAWS PDF Partners for $99 retail.
~~ Dave

Apple Legal Customer Case Study

Link: Apple - Small Business - Small Practice, Big Presence.

Apple has finally restored a Legal Solutions section to their Business site. This story highlights a small firm in Ohio that switched to Macs -- the second page talks about how easy it is to create PDFs just using OS X, and to efile those PDFs. Apple hasn't tried to make many inroads to the legal market -- we've actually been small potatoes as a market segment -- but they should. It's a much bigger market than it appears to be. (If anybody from Apple reads this, contact me and I'll tell you why and how.)

I haven't written a lot yet about the Mac OS -- I use Windows at the office and Mac OS 10.3 at home/consulting -- but I am totally sold on its ability to handle pretty much every aspect of being a "PDF lawyer" right out of the box. In fact, I think that with the advent of the next version, OS X 10.4 "Tiger," I will construct a whole PDF efiling workflow (and possibly lit support system) using only what comes with the system. And it's gonna kick butt.

More on that later....
Dave

How do judges digitally sign orders?

activePDF is a company that supposedly has helped courts streamline their document workflow, including the process of having judges digitally sign orders.  They sent me this link with more information (pdf file).  I make no recommendations since I haven't used their services but it seems like it would be helpful in many cases.

Tablet PC's 'digital ink' not PDF compatbile

Phil Windley has an interesting post about the limitations of the Tablet PC's digital ink feature. Namely, that it doesn't work with PDF documents:

"About a month ago I bought a Tablet PC (HP T1100). Mostly I wanted to see how it worked, play with the form factor and so on. Tuesday I'm flying to DC for and NSF Review panel. I have about 15 proposals to comment on before I get there and they're in PDF format. I thought "The tablet is the perfect form factor for working on an airplane, especially since all I have to do is read and comment on the documents." How natural it would be to view the PDF document and write notes on it. Unfortunately, it can't be done as far as I can tell. This floors me. The Tablet's been out for two years and you still can't do digital ink on PDF documents. Wow!"

Truly unfortunate. As more lawyers and judges use PDFs they are going to learn about, and use, the commenting features that are available in the full version of Acrobat. Somehow you would expect Microsoft to address this deficiency in the digital ink software.

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.

Converting PDFs to Word

The New York Times has this article on a $50 product that allows you to convert a PDF document into a Word file. Two observations: (1) it won't work on "imaged" PDF files, only on PDF files that have been created from a text based source; and (2) the most recent version of Acrobat, version 6.0, does this conversion pretty well. So the only reason to get the ScanSoft product would be if you need to convert text-based PDFs to Word and you don't have Acrobat 6.0.

I should mention that version 6.0 of Acrobat is very quick with converting image files from other formats (e.g. TIFFs) to PDFs, but that's a subject for another post.

Free trial version of Acrobat 6.0 Professional

Adobe is making available a free 30 day trial version of Acrobat 6.0 Professional (Windows only). You will be required to create an Adobe ID before downloading the Adobe Acrobat Professional tryout. If you have other Acrobat software versions installed on your system, you may be prompted to uninstall these versions. It is recommended that you have installation CDs from previous Acrobat versions easily accessible before installing the tryout software.