Acrobat for Legal Professionals

July 28, 2007

Hear Rick's Podcast on Lawbiz.com

Ed Poll is one of the nicest people you'll meet in the legal business. Ed has practiced law for over 25 years as a solo practioner, partner and COO of a mid-sized firm.

Since 1990, Ed has worked as a consultant to law firms around the country.

Not only does Ed know a lot about running law firms and bringing in business, he also is a great legal technologist. Even better, he's a consultant who likes to share!

On Ed's lawbiz.com website, (opens in a new window) he offers articles, books and services that will help your firm run better.

His lawbiz blog (opens in a new window) is another great resource. The blog also hosts podcasts.

Click for details about two podcast interviews I did with Ed on the topic of Acrobat 8.

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08:41 AM | Permalink | No Comments

Rick's Scanning Article on LLRX.com

LLRX.com is a great destination for legal professionals.

This independent, web journal for legal, library, and marketing professionals is— amazingly— a one-woman operation!

Sabrina Pacifici is the brains behind this site which receives more than 130,000 unique readers each month.

When Sabrina asked me to contribute an article that would appeal to a large number of legal pros, I immediately thought about scanning and OCR.

Almost everyone has to find a way to get paper documents into their computer.

Read on for a link to the article and a brief summary.

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05:37 AM | Permalink | No Comments

July 26, 2007

30 Dirty Tricks: Attendee Materials

My colleague Tim Huff and I developed these materials for our recent 30 Dirty Tips for Acrobat 8 Seminar.

The event was recorded and I'll post the link to the archived version here when it is available.

The materials are a 25-page PDF with step-by-step instructions that will allow you to do some pretty amazing things with Acrobat.

Enjoy!

Click below to get to the materials.

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11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments [1]

July 18, 2007

Managing, Annotating and Searching PDF Packages

In my last article Search and Combine using PDF Packages, I discussed how to search a large number of documents and combine the resulting documents into a PDF package.

The result was a PDF package containing a target list of documents for further investigation.

With this “hot” set of documents in hand, it is time to carefully review them. You want to find out:

        • Who is mentioned in the documents
        • The issue(s) associated with the documents
        • When actions took place

Once you have all of this information, what do you think about what you found? How will you make your case?

In this article, you’ll learn how to:

  1. Add Notes or Annotations to a document in the package
  2. Add or delete documents in the package
  3. Search within a package, including your annotations
Read on to see how Acrobat can be used as a case analysis tool in this second article of the series.

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03:31 AM | Permalink

July 11, 2007

Search and Combine using PDF Packages

Attorneys take large amounts of information and winnow it down to get to the documents that matter.

What’s the best way to do that with Acrobat?

I received this email today from someone who stopped by the Adobe booth at LegalTech West:

I [ use Acrobat to ]OCR legal docs and then do a search of them to come up with a smaller target of documents, i.e search Dr. Smith and all docs with his name in it come up in the search. I would then like to (A) print just those docs and (B) create a new PDF of just those docs, but I cannot figure out how to do it. Is it possible?

I had to think about this one… Acrobat can’t do it automatically.

Read on to learn about a workaround that might work for you.

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