Acrobat for Legal Professionals

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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NOTE: This older article only pertains to Acrobat 9. Use an Action to Flatten documents with Acrobat X or XI.

I recently did a Digital Signatures eSeminar (you can watch the recording here), and one of the top questions asked was:

How do I flatten a PDF document so my signature stamp cannot be easily removed?

In previous articles (1, 2) I’ve discussed how to scan in your signature and create a stamp which you can use to “sign” documents.

Once you place the signature on your document, it appears as an annotation in a layer on top of the base document.

This allows you to move or delete the stamp.

However, the recipient of your file can also move or delete your stamp, or print without your stamp showing.

That is worrisome . . .

The solution is to flatten the document before sending it out.

Flattening means to move the stamp information to the main document layer so it will always print and cannot be selected and deleted easily.

Many folks simply print the document to the AdobePDF print driver. However, that process takes several steps.

In this article I’ll show you how to download and install a free script that adds two menu items to Acrobat:

Read on to learn how to:

• Download the free Flatten Pages script
• Install the Script
• Use the Flatten Pages feature
• Issues and Caveats
• Electronic vs Digital Signatures

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I received a lot of positive correspondence after I created and posted a set of Dynamic Exhibit Stamps in my blog article Add Dynamic Exhibit Stamps in Acrobat using a free stamp set.

If you followed the instructions in the article, a new, dynamic stamp was installed in the Comment and Markup toolbar.

When you use the stamp, Acrobat . . .

1. Asks you for the case number:

   

2. Stamps it on the document
   

A number of lawyers pointed out that they need to stamp more than just the exhibit number.

David Masters, author of the book “The Lawyers Guide to Adobe Acrobat“, emailed me this:

In Colorado, our courts expect exhibit stickers to indicate Plaintiff’s or Defendant’s and have the case number on them.

The job then was to create a dynamic stamp which asked for two lines of input. More importantly, the stamp should be able to be customized.

Mission accomplished and delivered in this blog article!

Once applied, a stamp looks like this:

Read on for:

• Credits
• Download
• Installation
• How to use the stamp
• Instructions on how to customize the stamps

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Exhibits are documents attached to pleadings or contracts which are referenced by the main document.

Exhibits generally are numbered (1, 2, 3) or lettered (A, B, C) consecutively in the order they are first encountered in the body of the referencing document (brief, contract, etc.).

In order to easily tell one exhibit from another, case documents are often stamped with an easy-to-see exhibit stamp:
.

Since PDF is the defacto (or often mandated) eFiling standard, it didn’t come as a surprise that I’ve received a few emails on this exhibit stamping PDFs over the last couple of years.

I’ve written previously about creating custom stamps, but an Exhibit Stamp has both a static graphic element and a changing numeric or alphabetic element. I have proposed a workaround using watermarks and the typewriter tool to some firms, but that still was a lot of work.

Only recently have I come across an elegant solution that can accomplish both steps with a click! When you stamp the document, Acrobat will ask you for the exhibit number, then stamp it on the document:

Read the full article to download a special stamp set that does the work for you.

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Attorneys and other legal professionals use Acrobat comments and annotations to stamp their signature on documents, add highlights, circle important passages, etc.

I recently received this email message from an attorney:

I use the Stamp tool to affix a graphic of my signature to pleadings before e-filing them or sharing them with other counsel.  But recipients who fail to choose to print with “Document and Markups” produce a doc that lacks my signature.  So, I’ve taken to flattening them by printing to my PDF driver, but that produces a doc of embarassingly poor quality.

Some Background

Acrobat offers the ability to print documents with or without comments. If you choose File—>Print, you will see the following option:

If you had a heavily commented document with lots of highlights, you may wish to print a clean copy by choosing the “Document” option.

Once you select an option here, the setting is sticky for the next time you print from Acrobat.

Unfortunately, signature stamps are also a type of annotation. If your client or colleague has recently chosen the “Document” option, the important agreement you worked on won’t have your signature.

Fortunately, there are some good workarounds:

1. Flatten the document so that Stamps and Annotations become part of the document layer
2. Embed your signature as an image, rather than a stamp
3. Add a special “Print with Comments” button to your document.

In this article, I’ll discuss these three workarounds. Read on to learn about them.

Acrobat Comments,PDF Comments,Printing Acrobat Comments,Flattening PDF,Flattening Comments

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I recently received an email about using the Text Highlighter tool in Acrobat:

I enjoy your articles on using Adobe. One item I use very often is the Text Highlighter tool. I mark text in different colors depending on the substance of the text itself. To do so, I mark the text in question and then open the Properties Box and then select the color I need.

This can be very time consuming as I am constantly switching back and forth on the colors. I was wondering, is there is a faster way to select a different color?

Mark E. Schell
Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Unit Corporation

At first I was stumped, but then I remembered the solution!

The Properties Bar in Acrobat which offers quick access to many tool options.

Read on to learn about using the Properties Bar to quickly change text highlight colors.

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Attorneys and other legal professionals have discovered that they can scan their scan their signature and easily turn it into an Acrobat stamp.

The resulting stamp, however, has a white background.

When stamped on top of documents, the results are not visually pleasing:

To create a transparent stamp, you must “feed” Acrobat a file with transparency capabilities such as a GIF or Photoshop PDF.

Read on to learn how . . .

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