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December 15, 2008
Case Analysis Part III: Exporting a PDF Portfolio List to a Spreadsheet
In previous articles on PDF Portfolios for Case Analysis (see Part 1 and Part 2), I discussed how to create, customize and code files in a PDF Portfolio to help you work with case documents.
Law firms often need to share information about case files. For example, you may need to create a report about the files contained in a PDF Portfolio to share in discovery.
Out-of-the-box, Acrobat does not offer the ability to export the Portfolio List View.
Fortunately, Adobe's Acrobat Technical Evangelist Joel Geraci has posted Joel's PDF Portfolio Utilities on his PDF Dev Junkie Blog. Using this free utility, you can easily export the list view.
In this article, I will discuss how to use this utility.
December 8, 2008
PDF Portfolios for Case Analysis: Part 2
PDF Portfolios— a new feature of Acrobat 9— are useful for Case Analysis.
In PDF Portfolios for Case Analysis, Part 1, I covered how to:
- Download and use a special Portfolio template for Case Analysis
- Customize the Portfolio Cover Sheet and Header
- Create folders
- Add new columns to capture fielded information
In this article, I will discuss how to:
- Add your own case files to the Portfolio
- Move files to appropriate folders
- Add keywords
- Sort and Filter information
I'll also include a few tips for working with PDF Portfolios.
October 12, 2008
PDF Portfolios for Case Analysis: Part 1
| June 16, 2009 Note: I've made several changes to this post including an updated Case Analysis Portfolio template. |
Case Analysis is the process of reviewing documents associated with a case and making decisions about them. For example, you might use Acrobat to help you find:
- Documents containing your clients name
- Documents which relate to a specific issue
- Documents which are privileged
A PDF Portfolio is a single PDF document which contains other documents. By keeping the documents together in a PDF Portfolio, we can accelerate document review.
In this article series, I'll discuss how to use Acrobat 9 and a PDF Portfolio for Case Analysis.
For some background on PDF Portfolios, click here to view a demo movie.
In this article, you will open a Case Analysis Portfolio and customize it for your case. In Part 2, we will load documents and start to code and work with documents. In Part 3, you will learn how to export a PDF Portfolio to a spreadsheet file.
March 1, 2008
PDF Packages for Case Analysis: Cover Sheet Bookmarks
Legal professionals are starting to use PDF Packages increasingly for Case Analysis, and that led to this email which I received from a paralegal recently:
Is it possible to add a bookmark that can point to any place in any document in a PDF package? We use bookmarks extensively in our large document files (one of the reasons I liked the print bookmark workaround you came up with), which makes it easier to navigate a lot of information.
The short is answer is Yes!
In this article, I'll discuss how you can create links from the PDF Package Cover Sheet to any document in the package.
This technique offers you a central place where you are a click away from any important passage in any document in the package.
Using this technique, you can quickly get to the document locations which describe the key characters, issues and facts in your case.
Relevant Articles: A Read Me First This is the fourth in a series of Case Analysis articles on the use of PDF Packages. Read these other articles first for background. |
February 15, 2008
Using PDF Packages Header Fields for Case Analysis
Roughly defined, case analysis is the process of looking at the documents in your case and making decisions about them.
I've written previously regarding how . . .
- Acrobat can help you winnow down the large number of documents in a case using full-text search.
- An essential list of documents may be further managed and annotated in a PDF package.
In this article, I'll discuss ways in which you can code and capture your thinking about your case in a PDF Package.
Specifically, you'll learn:
- How to create custom Header Fields
- How to fill in and use PDF Header fields to code documents, like a spreadsheet
December 4, 2007
Highlighting Multiple Words in a PDF Document
Acrobat has powerful search capabilities, but one feature which is lacking is persistent highlighting via search. I discovered an interesting workaround to this problem after pondering this email message from a customer:We have a fairly large case where I pulled up 7,000 pages of shift logs. I need to find select words throughout the document so I am using the word search to go through all the pages and pull out those pages that reference the word I am searching. I have some questions for you:
1) When the word search is done and I am looking at the document, all the words that I searched are highlighted in blue. However, when I print them off they are not highlighted anymore. Is there anyway to make it so those words are highlighted and will stay highlighted when I print them off and are easy to spot?
2) One of the words we are needing to search for our discovery produced over 3,000 pages. Obviously I really do not want to print off all of those pages. Is there anyway to print off a summary of where that word is on each page without printing off all 3,000 pages?
I scratched my head for a bit, but I found a great workaround which takes advantage of Acrobat 8's Redaction feature. The end result is a persistently highlighted document like this:
Read on to learn about the workaround in easy step-by-step instructions.
October 6, 2007
List PDF Bookmarks with a Free Script
Legal professionals use PDF bookmarks to mark important sections. Each bookmark goes to a different view or page in the document.
Recently, I’ve had several requests from legal customers who want to create a list of all of the bookmarks in their document.
For example:
Good news! Because Acrobat is extensible using JavaScript, you can create a bookmark listing like the one above (for free!) using the steps provided in this article.
The key is to install a tiny JavaScript sequence file which is accessed using the Batch Processing function of Acrobat Professional.
Read on to…
- Download a free, pre-built sequence file
- Install the sequence file
- Create a new PDF which lists the bookmarks in your file
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:
- Add Notes or Annotations to a document in the package
- Add or delete documents in the package
- Search within a package, including your annotations
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.