Acrobat for Legal Professionals

August 23, 2009

Preventing Edits to Bates Numbers applied in Acrobat

Bates Numbering is the process of sequentially numbering legal documents.

Acrobat 8 and 9 Pro allow you to apply and remove Bates Numbers to documents. To try it yourself, choose Advanced—> Document Processing—> Bates Numbering:

The ability to remove Bates Numbers is valuable in case you make a mistake during the numbering process. However, due to the adversarial nature of the legal business, attorneys may desire to limit what the other side can do with documents.

To whit, this email I received from an attorney last week:

What can I use to flatten Bates numbers so that they cannot be altered or removed using the Acrobat Bates numbering process?

I know I can print to PDF, save as TIFF, print-then-scan, etc., but am looking for a solution that will work in batch mode and not degrade the appearance of the file. Also, I don't favor using security settings because I don't want to restrict the user's ability to access the file.

In this article, I'll discuss how to "lock down" Bates Numbers so that they cannot be removed by Acrobat's "Remove Bates" option.

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August 3, 2009

Reducing the File Size of Scanned PDFs

It seems like a lot of folks are struggling with the size of scanned PDFs. Below are excerpts from two emails I received recently:

My [Fujitsu] ScanSnap makes PDFs that are too big . . . like around 60K per page! What can I do to make these smaller in Acrobat?

I have to eFile [with the Federal Court] and am having to split the filings into many segments to go through the [Court] gateway. The issue seems to be with documents that are scanned on our network scanner. PDFs produced directly from Word are a lot smaller. Is there some trick to reduce the size of scanned files?

Before covering how to reduce the size of scanned documents in detail, let's discuss four factors that affect the size of scanned images:

1. Scanning Resolution
   A scan at 600 dpi results in a much larger file than at 300 dpi.
2. Color Space
   Color and grayscale files result in much larger files than black and white files.
3. Physical dimensions of the scanned page
   A legal-size scan will be larger than a letter-size scan, with all other factors being equal.
4. Compression
   Raw scan data can be compressed to make it smaller.

 

Compression Types
Lossless compression retains the exact appearance of the original. Two common types of lossless compression are ZIP and CCITT Group 4.	Lossy compression makes some (hopefully) non-noticeable visual trade-offs to further reduce file size. JPEG is a common lossy compression method.

Ideally, you would control all of the above factors yourself by scanning at 300 dpi, black and white and using an efficient compression algorithm.

Unfortunately, you many not have that option. Many desktop and network scanners offer limited or confusing options— or— the scanned PDFs arrived from outside your firm.

Legal Scanning Recommendations In almost all situations, scan at 300 dpi, black and white.

For the purpose of this article we will make a couple of assumptions:

1. You have a black and white scanned document of unknown dpi and compression
2. You have already OCR'd the document, or don't need OCR

Read on to learn how to reduce the file size of scanned documents using Acrobat.

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