Acrobat for Legal Professionals

I prepared some extra-special materials for the 2010 International Legal Technology Show (ILTA).

The materials have been well received here at the booth, and my colleague Mark Middleton suggested that I share them with all of you.

The materials contain:

• Acrobat Legal Resources
  • Links to eSeminars and other web resources
• Deployment Resources for Acrobat 9,Creative Suite 5, Flash Player and AIR
  • Of interest to IT professionals who deploy these products
• Acrobat Updates: What You Should Know
  • Helps you understand the Update process
• Acrobat 9 Legal Quick Start Guide
  • Quick start guide to learn many of the core functions of Acrobat
• Acrobat 9 Pro Legal Feature Matrix
  • Learn what feature is in Adobe Reader, Standard, Pro and Pro Extended
• Acrobat 7-8-9 Legal Feature Comparison
  • See new features added over time
• Acrobat 9 Customization Wizard
  • Learn about Adobe’s free tool for customizing and deploying Acrobat and Adobe Reader
• Creative Suite 5 Version Matrix
  • Learn what products are in each version of the Creative Suite

Three ways to download this 800K PDF file:

1. Directly from this link
2. From Acrobat.com account
3. Via the Acrobat.com widget below.

Enjoy!

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The creativity of legal professionals using Acrobat never ceases to amaze me.

One area, in particular, that some of our geekier (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) customers have exploited in Acrobat is scripting.

Acrobat may be extended using JavaScript, a scripting language used in a variety of applications including web browsers.

Attorney Michael Tracy has developed a unique transcript mark-up utility which is is used to highlight, underline, and annotate deposition transcripts.

You can read an explanatory article and download the utility here:

http://www.michaeltracylaw.com/attorney-tools.html

Many thanks, Michael, for sharing this script with the rest of us!

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Attorneys are ethically bound to rigorously defend the confidentiality of clients.

For that reason, legal professionals often want to limit the distribution of documents. Accordingly, I received the following email from at attorney this week:

Is there any way I can prevent someone from forwarding a PDF I send to them?

While it is impossible to prevent someone from forwarding a file, you can prevent the next person from opening it.

How?

Can’t I use passwords?

It is easy to password protect a PDF document. (See Password Security using Adobe Acrobat 8 or 9 ).

Anyone who enters the correct password can open the document. However, that does not prevent the recipient from giving the password to another party who could, in turn, open the document.

Public Key Cryptography

Public Key security is a great way to limit who can open PDF documents. Acrobat uses a mathematical algorithm to create a related pair of keys— a secret private key and a public key.

Here’s how it works in practice:

1. The parties exchange public keys using Acrobat or Adobe Reader
2. You encrypt a PDF using the public key of the recipient(s)
3. The PDF can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key of your intended recipient

Read on to learn how to exchange PDF documents and prevent forwarding.

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Redaction is the permanent deletion of data from
documents.

In the past, black marker might have been used to obscure text. These days, with electronic workflows, Acrobat is used to safely and permanently remove content from the data stream of the document.

Acrobat 9 Pro offers powerful redaction capabilities. How can you get started?

To help, I bring you Rick’s Semi-definitive Guide to Using Redaction in Acrobat. This article is a compilation and update of some earlier articles with some additional content. This article offers a step-by-step guide to using these tools in your firm or organization.

Read on for the rest of the article.

Rick’s Redaction Resources Watch a brief Redaction tutorial Movie Watch a one-hour Redaction and Metadata Removal eSeminar Read Redaction Tips and Techniques Article

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Sticky Notes are probably the most common method used to add notes and comments to PDF documents.

To add a Sticky Note, simply right-click anywhere on the page and choose Add Sticky Note. A sticky note will appear and you can add text to it easily.

Sticky notes can be minimized so that they don’t cover up your document, or left open so you can see the text inside:

One frequent question I get is how to print pages with the contents of the sticky note showing.

In this article, you’ll discover how to print a document with the sticky notes showing in Acrobat.

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You just received 1000 PDFs from the other side which are a mix of PDFs created from Office applications and scans. Some of the documents might have been OCRd and some not.

How can you quickly detect which files need to be OCRd?

Further, how can you pull out and separate searchable and non-searchable PDFs?

I have written on this subject previously in my article "Is that PDF Searchable?" That post included information on how to test if individual documents are searchable and offered a basic way to detect searchability across files.

I’ve been doing some research and in this article I offer up another way to check for searchable text.

To accomplish this, we will use the Preflight feature of Acrobat Pro. Acrobat’s Preflight feature offers hundreds of different tests including the ability to check for characters on the page. Preflight can be used on a single document or it can be automated using a batch sequence.

The following workflow isn’t perfect, but I offer it here to legal professionals who want to experiment with it.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a Batch Sequence to run across folders of files which will:

1. Separate searchable PDFs from non-searchable PDFs and place them in named folders
2. Ignore non-PDF documents
3. Create a Summary Report of searchability

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Print. Sign. Scan. Fax or email. Repeat.

Print. Sign. Scan. Fax or email. Repeat.

If that sounds familiar to you, you’ll want to try Adobe eSignatures, an online electronic signature service.

This service is an easy to use, cross-platform, guided service that is easy enough for anyone to use. The service is in Beta (testing) right now and is free.

Here’s how it works:

• You upload a document to the Adobe eSignatures website
• Through the service, you invite people to sign the document
• Signers create a free account on the service (Your standard Adobe ID is all you need)
• Signers sign online, in the browser
• You are alerted when all parties have signed the document
• A digitally signed PDF is returned to you (and your signers) with a signature page appended to the document (see below).

Since the file is digitally signed, once completed, no changes are possible to the document.

Further, the document is time-stamped and certified:

In this article, I’ll offer a quick walk-through of the service and offer some additional tips and thoughts.

Currently the service is free, so give it a whirl.

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Electronic Discovery (ED or EDD) is the use of electronic information as part of the discovery process.

Acrobat 9 includes an email archiving feature which allows you to convert email in Outlook and Lotus Notes into a PDF Portfolio. This process is known as Email Archiving.

If my email inbox is any indication, more and more law firms are starting to use Acrobat to harvest and review email and folks have questions about working with the email attachments which are part of the production.

To start, please review my earlier post, Creating Email Portfolios for Small EDD Productions which tells you how to use Acrobat to harvest and review email.

Understanding the Email Portfolio Format

Before we dive in, it is helpful to understand how an Email Portfolio works.

Structurally, an Email Portfolio is a multi-tiered storage format:

Thus, an Email Portfolio contains PDFs of email messages which in turn contain the attachments to the message.  The attachments are associated with the message. If you were to extract a message, the corresponding attachment would go along with it.

What about those Attachments? I need to print them!

While you can batch print from a PDF Portfolio, the attachments (represented in the dashed box above) won’t be printed.

Some firms have simply said they want to extract, convert to PDF, and print the attachments. Acrobat doesn’t make this process straightforward or easy and there is no way to keep emails and their associated attachments together.

However, here is a workaround that might help you, especially if your production is small and you just want to burst the attachments from the portfolio.

In this article, I’ll cover how to:

1. Convert an Email Portfolio to a PDF Binder
2. Extract attachments
3. Convert attachments to PDF and Print them

Read on to learn more . . .

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Legal Professionals often need to search across a large number of documents. Finding a key fact, name or term is an important part of how you will apply your knowledge to a case.

For example, recently a paralegal sent me this email:

An attorney I work with just gave me a list of about 50 words and phrases as part of a case. I need to mark these terms each time I find them in my case documents. Help! Is there a way I can list all of the search words in a PDF?

While many folks have discovered the Search functionality in Acrobat, Acrobat 9 and below do not offer the ability to save searches or report the results.

Oddly, the only tool in Acrobat that allows you to search for terms and mark them in a PDF is part of the Search and Redact feature. This will add a mark to the page around the search term.

I wrote about using this technique in my previous article Highlighting Multiple Words in a PDF Document.

In Acrobat 9 Pro, it is possible to highlight multiple search terms using this same technique and you can do so “jiffy quick”.

In this article I’ll show you how to:

1. Input a series of search terms and have Acrobat automatically mark them
2. Create a new PDF which summarizes all of the words where found

Read on to learn how to search and mark multiple words using Acrobat 9 Pro. . .

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While I was at the ABA Techshow, an attorney showed me a hyperlinked set of documents and exhibits his firm used in mediation.

This well-organized PDF apparently scared the pants off the large insurance company at the table. The result? A million dollar payday for the client!

One benefit of creating a nicely bookmarked and hyperlinked document is that the process itself captures your thinking about the best way to present the case.

In this article, I’ll cover the basics of hyperlinking in Acrobat.

However, to set the table, I’ll also cover how to combine several documents together. From there, we’ll use both bookmarks and links to achieve the objective of creating a well organized document.

Read on to learn more about hyperlinks in Acrobat . . .

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