Acrobat for Legal Professionals

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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Just a bit over three years ago, I sat in the audience of my first legal technology conference.

At the time, I remember feeling a bit overwhelmed with the industry terminology and workflow despite my eighteen plus years of experience in the software industry.

At this event and others, I was able to meet many legal technology speakers who were very helpful in bringing me up to speed.

Craig Ball, Esq., veteran speaker and expert in electronic discovery, was one of the first on the circuit that welcomed me. We had an opportunity to talk about the legal market and Acrobat.  I always look forward to seeing him at legal trade shows around the country.

The very first time I met Craig, he discussed how he used Acrobat to present information and shared a frustration with the product.

“I can’t just place an image into a PDF. Why not?”

In Acrobat 6 and 7, there was a multi-step process to create a stamp and place an image, but that was a lot of work.

In Acrobat 8 Pro and up, placing an image is much easier. Craig . . . this one’s for you!

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Note: The Typewriter tool was completely re-written in Acrobat 9. I recommend all users upgrade if you depend heavily on the Typewriter tool. In Acrobat 9 and up, users can also set the font, size, and color of Typewriter text.

File this in the category of  “we’re not perfect.”

Sometimes, the Acrobat 7 (and up) Typewriter tool will change opacity (transparency) from black to a light gray. I’ve seen this bug myself and have heard from a few folks via this blog that they’ve seen it too.

Read on for some a possible fix.

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Many of us have rubber stamps in our office. Perhaps you mark incoming documents as “Received” or invoices as “Paid”. Some attorneys have signature stamps. Stamps are useful because they quickly tell us status information about a document.

You can bring stamps into the digital realm by creating custom stamps in Acrobat Standard or Professional. Then, you can stamp away on any PDF.

Stamps help add impact to your digital communications.

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Note: Acrobat 8 and up use a consolidated commenting toolbar. You no longer need to open a separate toolbar as mentioned in this post.

Problem: You have tons of medical records to review which contain signatures and handwritten notes.

Acrobat’s commenting tools may bark at you when you try to use the highlighter and other tools.

What to do?

One of the not-too-obvious features of Acrobat is the ability to add notes and comments to documents that have not been OCR’d.

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Forms offer a standardized way to collect information, but very few folks take the time to create them properly using Acrobat form tools.

Have you ever received — via email or snail mail– a field-less form to fill in? What a pain it is to drag out an old-fashioned typewriter to do this. Then, you have to scan the form back in and email it. Yechh!

But, there’s hope!

With the Acrobat 7.05 update, Adobe introduced a new tool for users of both Acrobat Standard and Professional—the Typewriter tool.

Update: Enhanced Typewriter tool in Acrobat 9.
The Typewriter tool was enhanced in Acrobat 9 and allows you to set font, size and color.

Where is the Typewriter tool in Acrobat X?
Acrobat X also offers the Typewriter tool. You’ll find it in the Content Panel and it is labeled “Add or Edit Text Box”:

The Typewriter tool provides a simple solution for filling out forms that do not contain interactive form fields. You can type on top of any PDF document, even one you created from a scanner. This allows you to easily fill out paper forms on your computer and archive the results electronically, or send the completed form via email.

I showed this new feature at a paralegal conference not long ago and a lady came up after my talk and hugged me!

Read on to learn how to obtain and use the Typewriter tool.

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