PDF for Lawyers

Review: Adobe Reader for iPad

My good friend Jeff Richardson has a thorough review of the new Adobe Reader app for the iPad and iPhone. I agree with everything he says. The key points in his review are;

• Reader is an easy app to learn, but it doesn't allow any annotations.
• Reader is fine, but there are other apps that do the same thing.
• Reader is free, but GoodReader is only $5 and does pretty much most of what you'd want a PDF app to do (including annotations).

Virtually every tech-savvy lawyer I know recommends GoodReader as the key PDF app that you need to have for an iPad. As David Sparks observes in his iPad at Work book, "if PDF apps were prizefighters, GoodReader would be the one with the crooked nose that has a knack for putting all its competitors, even the pretty boys, on the mat." If you want to sign PDF documents on your iPad get PDF Expert ($10).

And for more excellent tips on how to use PDFs on your iPad get David Sparks' book. It's truly an amazing resource for getting the most out of your iPad.

Web capture - How fast can you do it in Acrobat X?

Capturing web pages is not something that comes up every day for users of Acrobat X, but I recently had to use this feature to download a 7 page website. Acrobat X (on my Mac) took what seemed to me to be an inordinately long time: 5 minutes and 10 seconds for the 7 page site. I tested it in Acrobat 9 (also on my Mac) and got the same result.

I decided to use another program: PDFPenPro, which is a $99 Mac-only program that does most of what Acrobat does. I was astonished at the difference: it only took 5 seconds to capture the same website using PDFPenPro. That's an improvement of something like 500%, maybe more. I'm not a mathematician. 

All I know is I won't be using Acrobat's web capture for any site that I can snag with PDFPenPro.

Capturing web pages with Acrobat

These days a lot of litigation requires lawyers to capture information on a website, or a web page. If you learn about online information damaging to the other side of your case you should capture it immediately. The easiest way to do this is to just go to the page in question, and 'print to PDF.'  If you have Acrobat I'm sure you know how to do this.

Let's say you want to capture the information on my law firm website (actually a blog), which is at www.svensonlaw.com. You can pull that up in your browser and then select 'print to PDF'.  The result will be a capture the output on the home page. Now you have to do this for each separate page on my site, which has 5 separate pages. Not a big deal, maybe, because my site isn't that big.

But even with a small site like mine it's a lot more efficient to simply direct Acrobat to capture the entire site.  Here's how you do that in Acrobat 9 (Standard or Pro). First go to ADVANCED > WEB CAPTURE > CREATE PDF FROM / APPEND WEB PAGE. Then you'll get a dialogue box like this.

Don't click on the CREATE button. That would yield only a capture of the home page, which is too limited. You want to capture the entire site, so click on the button to the left of the text in the lower left that says 'Capture Multiple Levels'. Once you do that you'll get a dialogue box like this:

Don't click just yet. You'll notice that here the dialogue box is set to only capture the first level. You want to get the entire site, so click that box.

The next dialogue box will warn you of the perils of trying to capture an entire site, which is reasonable because I'm sure some lawyers out there might think that they can use this tool to capture the CNN.com site. That would take a really long time and create a really large file, if it worked at all. And that's what the next dialogue box is trying to make you aware of.

So just click YES and the process will start. Just to give you an idea of how long it might take to capture a small website, it took about a minute to capture the 5 pages on my law firm website.  The result of the capture is a nicely bookmarked PDF file, which looks like this:

This is obviously much better than creating separate PDF files for each page by using the 'print to PDF' function. If you did that you'd have to merge the files into one file, which is easy to do but does involve a whole extra step. With the web capture function you can be sure that you're getting the entire site (or however many levels you choose to capture).

Granted, there are times you may have to resort to simply 'printing to PDF,' such as when you try to capture certain sites that are password protected (e.g. Facebook pages). But you can always try the web capture at one or two levels and see what happens, and then fall back on the 'print to PDF' function if you're not capturing the pages using the web capture.

As I mentioned earlier, this feature is part of Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro.

iPhone 3Gs as a portable scanner that creates PDFs

For years I've toyed with the idea of getting a portable document scanner like the Fujitsu S300 for those few times when I'm in court and need to copy a few pages of a case record.  The local state court here in New Orleans charges $1.00 per page, which is of course ridiculous.  But the real hassle is that it takes an incredibly long time to get the copies made, and then pay for them.  Hence my motivation to find a way to scan a few pages here and there.

The problems with using the Fujitsu are: (1) it costs $240, which means I'd have to do a lot of scanning to justify it, and (2) it has to be hooked to a computer, which means I'd be lugging a lot of hardware just to do a few scans.  And that is why I've never been able to justify buying that scanner.

Now, thanks to the improved camera on the latest iPhone, there is another option that is perfectly acceptable, and costs only $10.  I've been testing an application called DocScanner, and I now report that it does a perfectly acceptable job of creating PDF images using the iPhone 3Gs. And let me emphasize that I am not suggesting that it would do as well with the iPhone 3G, because I think you need the focusing ability of the new phone to get acceptable images.  Here is an example of a receipt that I was able to 'scan' using the application. As you can see it's very good quality:

DocScanner lets you create multi-page PDFs simply by continuing to take pictures.  Once you're done you can choose to save the resulting PDF to your iPhone, or you can email it to yourself or anyone in your address book.

The process of creating the PDF can be slightly tricky the first few times you do it, but once you get the hang of it you can do it without much hassle.  The images as displayed on the iPhone seem low quality, but when you email them to yourself and examine them on a full computer screen the quality is usually quite impressive.  

Obviously, the trick is to get a good photo, which means having plenty of light and also holding the camera steady while you take the picture.  In that vein I might suggest that you also try these two applications: iFlashReady (which adds light to a dark image), and NightCamera (which is a sort of self-timer for the iPhone that delays taking the picture until your hands are most steady). So, if you use these applications to take pictures, how do you get them into DocScanner?  Easy. DocScanner lets you use images from your Cameral Roll.  So you'd just take the pictures of the pages you want to have, then apply the light adjustment (if needed) and then use DocScanner to convert them to PDFs which you can then join together into a multipage PDF that can be emailed or saved.

So, if you've been looking for a good way to create PDF scans of a few pages here and there you may have the solution you're looking for.  If you own an iPhone 3Gs, that is.  As I said, I don't think it will work very well with the older iPhones.  And I wouldn't try to do more than a few pages with it because I think it would get kind of frustrating.  For small jobs like receipts and expense reports, though, it's perfect!

Digitize your letterhead; simplify your life

When I started my solo practice 3 years ago I faced the usual smorgasbord of choices, among them was the question of law firm stationery.  Having lived through the disruption of Katrina, I had decided that everything I did from then forward would be as simple and efficient as possible.  The nomadic life I lived after Katrina caused me to become hyper-aware about how many office procedures are relics of the industrial era.  Office stationery is one of those relics.

Pre-printed letterhead was necessary before high-quality laser printers became affordable and widely used.  Any small business is going to have a laser printer, probably even one that prints in color.  Even most ink-jet printers are capable of printing high-quality text, which most people would not regard as cheap or unprofessional.

True, having your letterhead appear on high-quality stock paper is nice. But is it worth the trade-off in decreased inefficiency?  If you want to move towards a paperless workflow you need to consider all of the small inefficiency leaks.  Pre-printed letterhead is a systemic issue, and one that creates many bottlenecks.  And, of course, it also adds cost.

Think about it.  If you have pre-printed letterhead, then you need to have a special tray in every printer that will be used to print outgoing letters. Or, worse, you'll have to insert the letterhead before each print job that requires it.  This means that you'll have mistakes that will require reprinting, or you'll have problems when the printer runs out of letterhead paper.

If you digitize your letterhead then you dispense with the need for having 'special paper' as well as the need to make sure that each printer is stocked with that special paper.  All you'd have to do is call up the form document that has your 'letterhead' already included and then create your letter and print it out.  If you are sending the letter by email as a PDF then you don't need pre-printed letterhead anyway. And, frankly, the digital letterhead will probably look a lot better in PDF form.

So, you're now convinced that you need to digitize your letterhead.  How do you do it?  

Creating your digital letterhead is as easy as using your word processor to layout a document with header and footer information that reflects something similar to what your current letterhead looks like.  If you don't know enough about word processing to do this then find someone in your office who does.  The process might take an hour or so the first time; you'll get caught up in tinkering and tweaking things, which is fine.  But in the end, no matter how long it takes, you'll have a great looking letterhead that is stored digitally in your computer.  

You'll be free of the hassle of having to order, stock and re-provision special letterhead.  You'll save time and money, and increase the efficiency of your practice in a small, but very important, way.  Remember, we're now living in the information age, not the industrial age.

Twitter roundup: on becoming paperless

Here are some of the interesting tidbits that I posted in the Twitter page during the past week.  You can find all the Twitter posts from the PDF for Lawyers twitter site.

• How to move towards 'the paperless life'
  
• Docusign for all my electronic signature needs! Check it out!" (via @AlessandroFra)  
• Zumbox -paperless online mailbox for every street address in the US, incl. businesses (via @msquihuis)  
• Raleigh teacher goes paperless in wireless world. (via @wral) 
• Good state-by-state run down of ethics opinions on metadata mining: http://is.gd/nRD4 (via the ABA) 
• You need a digital signature, but don't know how to make one? Here's the scoop: http://is.gd/ctbl  

Get up to the minute tips on becoming paperless

As I mentioned last week, I've created a Twitter page for this blog.  Twitter is a great way to capture and distribute small chunks of information quickly.  It's easy for me to scan the Internet for interesting information about 'the paperless office' and then post it to Twitter.  So, if you want to check out these blurbs just visit this page.  Or if you're already on Twitter, just follow this site and you'll get the feeds as the come out. 

Also, I updated the main page of this weblog to include the latest twitter feeds.  Just look in the top left part of the page and you'll see them, along with a link to our special twitter page (where you can review all the twitter posts).

How to (successfully) switch to a paperless practice

In the three years that I've been practicing as a solo lawyer I have been completely paperless. Before that, when I worked in a large firm, I kept the files that I worked on by myself in a completely paperless form. So, when I hear people say that it's impossible to be completely paperless I know that's not true. In addition to my own personal experience, I know several lawyers who have completely paperless law practices.

It's true that some lawyers prefer not to become completely paperless (for various reasons). But, it's not because it would be extremely difficult; it's simply a matter of choice. What seems to be difficult, for many lawyers, is making the first step toward becoming paperless. Typically, a lawyer will buy a scanner, tinker with it, but then hit a small snag and get completely derailed.

Why is that? From my experience, there are a few common problems—none of which are hard to solve or expensive.

First, it's important to have a strong commitment. But sometimes commitment isn't enough.  For example, if the attorney is not technically skilled he or she can quickly run into small problems that seem insurmountable.  Getting the right scanner can help you avoid most of the technical snafus that plague most people.  That's why I always recommend that people start out by buying the Fujitsu ScanSnap 510  (If you have a Mac get the 510M version).

You may be tempted to get a different model, or you may say "well, I already have a very high speed office scanner/copier." Believe it or not, these are the statements that I often hear from those who have failed to make the transition. The Fujitsu ScanSnap has the highest rate of success because it's easy to use and easy to set up. Even so, it can be daunting for a beginner to learn how to set up the ScanSnap, and also to develop a basic scanning workflow.

So, my advice to people who want to start scanning is ALWAYS to: (1) get a Fujitsu Snap 510, and (2) hire someone to help you set it up and teach you how to use it.  The first step is easy (even though many people try to improvise away from it).  The second step, though, is the really important one.  Because, even folks who buy the ScanSnap sometimes hit snags.  

The first snags are about how to set the scanner up.

For example, what resolution setting should you be scanning at? Should you scan everything in color, or should you let the scanner decide whether to scanning color or black-and-white? Or should you force the scanner to always scan in black and white? [ANSWER: usually, you should scan to black-and-white]

Once you get all the settings tweaked properly, then you face the issue of adopting a new workflow. This is another delicate turning point, which can easily lead to failure. I'll discuss this issue next time, but for now let's review the two key points.

1.  You need an easy to use scanner it's also easy to set up. You need the Fujitsu ScanSnap (If you have a Mac get the 510M version).  You need this even if you have a scanner already—unless you are tech-savvy and highly motivated. 
2.  If you are not technically skilled and motivated, then you will need somebody to help you set up the scanner and learn how to use it. (You will also need someone to coach you on how to develop a digital workflow, which is something I'll talk about in the next post).  

  Who can you hire to help you?  Well, I can't say unless you live in New Orleans.  If you live here then I'd recommend Becky Diamante.  She has helped many small businesses and law firms become paperless.  She's not only good at setting up the scanner but also very good at getting people comfortable with using it (in most small businesses this is more important than setting up the scanner) 

Becoming paperless isn't hard and it isn't even expensive. But you probably do need some help.  You may not need help, but if you do then don't be afraid to get it.  It might mean the difference between success and failure.

Cheap, reliable offsite backup

Backing up your digital data is critical, but sadly many people aren't doing it.  It used to be semi-exusable not to backup your data (too hard to figure out, too expensive, my dog ate my homework), but not anymore.  What if you could backup all the key data on your computer for $50?  And what if the backup was automatically pushed 'offsite' so that your data wouldn't be vulnerable to a fire in your office?

Guess what?  Your prayers have been answered. Carbonite is only $49.95/year per computer no matter how much you need to back up. No hidden fees. No limits on backup storage capacity. You can try it free for 15 days (without even having to provide a credit card).  

So, if you aren't backing up your computer get thee to Carbonite right away.

First hand account of going paperless in a law firm

I've helped many people get over the hump in going paperless, and what I've learned is that the hump isn't that big.  But it seems like it to people when they first approach it.  If you believe that going paperless is hard, then read this first hand account of a law firm that did it.  I can't agree enough with one point that is made in the article: there is very little cost associated with going paperless.  In most cases, the cost is almost zero.

I also agree that the first step is to start getting your faxes delivered electronically.  No big expense there either.