Acrobat for Legal Professionals

December 16, 2005

Acrobat and PDF Clones: What you should know . . .

Chances are if you are on a legal technology listserve or read blogs, you'll hear about alternatives to Acrobat. Apparently, you can do everything with these alternative products that you can do with Acrobat for $29!

Sadly, the legal market seems especially amenable to these messages. Cheaper is better, right?

How did this happen?

You might wonder, how did Adobe get into the predicament where so many companies are competing to take away the Acrobat business?

Adobe spends millions of dollars developing and maintaining the Adobe Reader and gives it away free. Why?

Adobe decided at the beginning that PDF format would be a published specification. Whenever Adobe releases a new version of Acrobat, numerous documents are posted on the Adobe website documenting the structure of the PDF format. This openness is one of the reasons that the PDF is the standard it is today. Governments, in particular, want to be assured that should Adobe go out of business, they have a way to access the information they've published in the PDF format. This "guarantee" surely influenced many courts who have standardized on PDF today.

Note that the PDF specification is not open source or even an open specification. Adobe is the custodian of the PDF format and determines the structure and new features that are enabled with new versions of the PDF specification.

Many independent software vendors (ISVs) have created products that create PDF or work with PDF. In fact, there are at least 1000 products that classify themselves as primarily PDF-oriented.

My opinion is that the existence of all of these alternatives is great for the PDF ecosystem. Apple has offered PDF generation built into OSX for a couple of years now. Microsoft recently announced that they were adding PDF generation to Office 12. This is equivalent to a tacit endorsement of another vendor's format, something Microsoft hardly ever does. Until a four years ago, Microsoft didn't even post PDFs on their website!

Despite hundreds of products that compete with Acrobat in one way or another, Acrobat revenue at Adobe is growing strongly and is an important part of the business. In just the last couple of years, I've seen Acrobat usage change remarkably. It used to be the case that most law firms were only interested in creating PDFs. Now, I regularly hear from firms using Acrobat for review workflows, eBriefs, interactive Deal Books, and a lot of other cool applications.

PDF Spec: All of Some of it

Why spend $299 to buy Acrobat Standard instead of a free or low-cost clone?

One signficant reason-- Adobe does all of the PDF standard. Clones and competitors do some of it.

Differentiating between Acrobat and clone PDF providers isn't easy unless you have a bit of technical bent. Much of what makes a quality PDF is under the hood.

One example is fonts, the typefaces that allow you to view the right characters on-screen in a PDF from any application. There are pages and pages about font encoding in the PDF specification. Dealing with fonts is critcal and doing it correctly in all cases is technically challenging. Some developers take shortcuts. They may reason that their customer set may never use certain font encodings or need to view documents on non-English operating systems. So, many developers only do part of the font specification in the PDF language.

At LegalTech East in New York City (Janaury 2005) I talked to a patent attorney who had received some WordPerfect documents. WordPerfect has a good equation editor and the documents contained numerous math characters. He was pretty hot under the collar and was worried that he would be late producing documents! He had Adobe Acrobat and the PDFs weren't coming out right. I asked him how he created the PDFs. As it turned out, he created PDFs by going to the File menu in WordPerfect and choosing "Publish to PDF". That was the clue! WordPerfect includes clone PDF functionality in their word processor that he had accessed to produce the PDF. I explained the difference to him gave him directions for printing to the AdobePDF print driver. He made a special trip the next day to tell me that it worked! So, you see, even big established companies can find it challenging to do PDF well from their own products.

Whenever I talk with court technologists who have implemented eFiling, they want to talk about "bad" PDFs. These are files that fail to move correctly through their systems, take too long to print or exhibit viewing errors. In some cases, the PDFs were corrupted during transfer, but upon examination it is most often a PDF created with a non-Adobe PDF clone.

Fonts are only one area of consideration. The challenge with considering clones is that they may work perfectly well for 99 out of 100 documents then fail miserably without apparent reason.

Other Considerations

PDF Clones generally do a limited set of operations. They create PDFs and in some cases may allow watermarking, stamping, and other limited operations. Acrobat, of course, does a lot more than that.

The primary value of PDF is far beyond simple PDF creation today.

If all you need is PDF creation, consider buying Acrobat Elements. At under $40 per seat at quantity 100, it creates highly reliable Adobe PDF.

I get a lot of calls from Legal IT folks who need to be able to tell their boss why they are paying over $200 a seat for Acrobat instead of cheap clone. Here's some ammunition if you are one of those folks:

1. Adobe offers free deployment tools that allow large law firms to customize their deployment using industry-standard tools
2. Adobe makes the best, most compact, most accepted PDF files. Clones often don't do everything necessary in all cases to meet court standards.
3. Adobe PDF is structured (tagged) allowing your firm to meet government Section 508 accessibility requirements. As far as I know, the only way to get tagged PDF is using Adobe tools. Tagging is also critical for review workflows, accessibility, re-use, etc.
4. Adobe offers OCR, creation, review, etc. all in one package, not spread across several packages or requiring additional products
5. Adobe offers volume licensing for Acrobat and all of our products
6. Adobe owns the PDF spec . . . we are always ahead of the rest of the market
7. Adobe offers a variety of server products that tie PDF and Acrobat to business critical workflows
8. Adobe offers the most comprehensive security from simple usage restrictions to self-certifying documents which instantly alert you if a document has been changed
9. Adobe offers Reader enablement, so that you can send files to free Adobe Reader users for Review
10. Adobe offers the best QA'd, most reliable software. Our product has won numerous awards and is used by millions of users around the world.
11. Adobe is a Fortune 500 company. Most clones vendors are 3-15 people running on a shoestring without a long term commitment to you or the product. Some of the claims on clone websites are digital snake oil! Beware of comparison charts . . . they only tell you what the vendor wants you to know.
12. Adobe drives PDF adoption in government bodies worldwide who demand quality, predictable documents that meet court standards. New standards around PDF will always appear in Adobe products first. One recent example: PDF/A

Conclusion

Adobe still makes the best PDF and the best tools for working with PDF. Still other tools may work for certain tasks, but make sure you thoroughly test them against Acrobat Standard or Professional. Take a test drive, compare file sizes and how the files look on-screen. Try printing the files and timing print time.

Above all, does the product meet all your needs? Does it allow you fill in and save data in a court form? Does it allow you to efficiently combine PDFs to create eBriefs or Deal Books. Does it offer the ability to use robust commenting tools?

Acrobat isn't inexpensive, but that doesn't mean it isn't an excellent value and the right choice for your firm.

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