PDF for Lawyers

Search your PDF files - it's the fast way to find information

Most PDF files are searchable.  And, if they're not, then just make them so by OCR'ing them.  Let's take a quick example.  The  federal district courts in Louisiana have their entire local rules available on the webs.  But searching the rules online is cumbersome, so I decided to capture the rules to PDF.  I clicked on the the button that suggested allowed me to "print all local rules" and was hyperlinked to this page.

Instead of printing the entire set of rules to my printer I 'printed to PDF'.  That's a function built into the full versions of Acrobat (Standard and Professional).  The resulting PDF file size was about 500 kilobites, which is nothing.  But that file had 128 pages of local rules, as you can see for yourself.  That would be a lot of information to sift through if you wanted, as I did, to find the local rule on oral arguments in the Eastern District.  But, if you have a searchable PDF, finding the rule takes only a few seconds.

Just open the file in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, hit the 'Find" command and type in: 'oral argument.'  I think you'll agree this is a faster way than looking through the index.  But the ability to search PDFs really shines when you are looking for information that relates to your cases.

For example, I always OCR the documents I receive from opposing counsel.  The other day I was in a deposition and the witness was asked about a certain person and no one other than the questioner seemed to know who the person was.  I quickly searched the documents to see if that person's name appeared and, lo and behold, it did.  This would not have been possible if I hadn't made the documents searchable.  The OCR function in Acrobat 7.0 and 8.0 is really quick and reliable.  For more information, about OCRing your documents click here.

OCR: Yuor Sarech Enigne Cna't Raed Tihs

The limitations of relying on text searching become clear when you use a search engine on OCR'd documents. OCR software has gotten much, much better, but you can still count on 20+ errors on most non-laser-printed pages. I never count on text searching to locate the smoking gun....

There's a little silliness out there on the web illustrating how you can still make sense of words if the first and last letters are intact, even if all the others are scrambled.

That only works for HUMANS. Computers can only search the actual strings of letters. Some text-search products claim to have "fuzzy" searching capabilities. The only one that I've seen that came anywhere close to working was Excalibur (now Convera) RetrievalWare. It doesn't look like they are still marketing that aspect of it. It's expensive and takes significant tech expertise -- the implementation I used was implemented by Aspen Systems, a huge lit support contractor. Others may have had better luck than I did with the "fuzzy" features of other search tools. Firms used to pay to retype text files in an effort to clean up "dirty OCR." Surely everyone has better things to do with their lives..... In addition, it's not that easy to get to the "text layer" of a PDF file to alter the underlying text.

Remember, the IMAGE layer is a picture of the letters; the TEXT layer is the letters themselves. To a computer there is a huge difference, and on an OCR'd PDF they are NOT the same. When you use FIND or SEARCH, you are looking for strings of letters. If those letters are garbled, you won't find the words you are looking for.

I've long been a believer that your doc management system should allow you to both SEARCH for a document, and also to NAVIGATE to it. Text searching works very well on electronically generated PDFs (like word processing or email files). Otherwise, I use it as "rough cut" tool, to make a big pile of documents into a number of smaller piles. PDF (and specifically some tools built into Acrobat) help a lot.
That way, once you've found a good document, you know where to find it again -- don't keep running those queries every time.
Stay tuned.

--Dave--

Searching and Finding: Basic Principles

We recently received a message asking "what's the best tool to do text searches of PDF files, regardless of whether they are text on image or not?"
In my most lawerly voice, I reply "it depends." I would like to cover the key aspects of this in more than one post, because, like everything related to PDF, there's a lot lurking beneath the surface.

First, some distinctions and definitions. There is a crucial difference between "text" and "image." If you are talking about documents that were created directly from another program (like MS Word) you don't really have to worry about separating those concepts. (Well, not yet . . .) However, if you are dealing with pages that were scanned from hard copy, you've got to do some conceptual work. Second, there is a difference (in Acrobat) between the SEARCH command, and the FIND command.

Layers
It's easy for most people to visualize that PDFs, like ogres and onions, have layers. For now, we'll deal with only 3 of them. First, the "image" layer. This is a picture -- like a TIFF image.

Key concept: YOU CAN'T SEARCH AN IMAGE ALONE.

Second, there is the "text" layer.

Key concept: SEARCH ENGINES SEARCH TEXT

If you just have "image" PDFs, you'll need to create the text in order to have something to search -- the process is called "Optical Character Recognition" or OCR. This is the same process that many lawyers are familiar with in the scan to TIFF/OCR/put it in Summation loop. Keep in mind that OCR is not even close to perfect, and scanned PDFs are subject to the same errors as any other OCR'd document.

There are about a zillion ways to create an "image + text" PDF file. One is to use the Acrobat "paper capture" tool. With the full version of Acrobat, you can take an existing image file or image-only PDF and "capture" the text. Note that you are limited to 50 pages per document with Acrobat alone. (You can't do "capture" with Acrobat Reader). There are separate "Acrobat Capture" products for high-volume scanning from vendors including Adobe and Doculex. I'll spend more time on the "capture" issues in a later post. Probably the easiest way to handle it is to take your CD-ROMs of images down to the local service bureau and have them do the conversion. Negotiate the price -- "per page" pricing is the standard (I assume because it's the lazy way), but it doesn't make sense as a pricing model.

Okay, so you have Image (not searchable) and Text (searchable) layers. The third layer is the "metadata" layer. This contains info like the author, date, and (very important) keywords that you assign to the document.

Key concept: The Metadata layer is SEARCHABLE.

Find v. Search
This is pretty easy. FIND (ctrl + F, or Edit >> Find) searches the text of the open document only. The FIND tool is on the toolbar -- it's the single set of binoculars. This is just like the FIND command in pretty much every Windows and Mac application.
SEARCH, on the other hand, searches a collection of documents. The SEARCH tool is the binoculars + sheet of paper (or whatever the heck that thing is) button. When you hit SEARCH, you fall into a deep pool of commands, indexes, catalogs, and advanced capabilities. Acrobat uses the Verity search engine, which has long been one of the industry standard desktop (and server) search tools. (I assume Adobe is still using Verity in v. 6 -- I haven't investigated.) This is a full-on, boolean, high-speed indexed search tool.

Search also allows you to search by keyword. (In a later post, I'll talk about assigning keywords, and using them effectively.)

One other key difference is that FIND just starts at the beginning of the document and searches page 1, page 2, etc. in order. SEARCH relies on an index, which makes it both faster and easier. Say you have 1000 page document (what the hell are you thinking? Is this really 200 documents all rolled into one big file? Break them up and index them -- it's worth the trouble.) FIND will take forever as you roll through in page order. SEARCH will give you a list of hits that will jump you right to your page. Much faster.

Search Tools
Pretty much every litigation support database (Summation, Concordance, etc.) will support PDF searches. But, using just the computer's file system and SEARCH, you can get excellent searching capabilities without any database at all. There are advantages to lit support databases, but they accrue mostly to litigation support firms that bill by paralegal-hour.

I'm also very excited about Apple's new Preview application that should be coming out soon with OS X 10.3 "Panther." Apple claims that it is the fastest PDF viewer ever. And the demo by Steve Jobs showed some very very cool search capabilities, which include a "hit list" in a "drawer" that slides out from the app. Stay tuned....

"Searching" Images
Having said all that, it is possible to look for documents or pages without searching the text. Your eye can certainly identify documents without reading them. Even a very small thumbnail will allow you to tell, say, an invoice from a letter. If you have to do it without text search, open your file up, and click the "Thumbnail" tab. (If there aren't thumbnails, create them.) Thumbnails don't have to line up single-file down the left side. Pull that divider bar all the way to the right side of the window. Depending on the size of your screen, you should get 8-10 little images in every row. Then start scrolling. . . Double click a thumbnail to read to page.

More to come . . .
Dave