Wednesday (Dec 28th) 
Digital Case Management

Acrobat & PDF Tips

Email Efficiency & Practice

E-Discovery panel (no slides)

Social Networking for Lawyers

Efficiency in Info Gathering

Digital Office & Consultants – (no slides)

Thursday (Dec 29th) 
Articulate Advocacy 

Little Big Firm – Tips for small firm lawyers

Digital Note-taking

Cloud Computing

Mobile Lawyering – Smartphones and iPads

60 Tips in 60 Minutes

CLE seminars should teach you stuff that’s useful, that’s a given. But we think they should be visually engaging, and —dare we say it— fun. In a few weeks we’ll be announcing our schedule for December, which is when we typically put on a two-day seminar in New Orleans. We’re contemplating doing a one day seminar in Baton Rouge in early December too.

If you want to be notified whenever we do a seminar (and also get a weekly email with all of our posts) click this link and enter your email address.

CLE seminars should teach you stuff that’s useful, that’s a given. But we think they should be visually engaging, and —dare we say it— fun. In a few weeks we’ll be announcing our schedule for December, which is when we typically put on a two-day seminar in New Orleans. We’re contemplating doing a one day seminar in Baton Rouge in early December too.

If you want to be notified whenever we do a seminar (and also get a weekly email with all of our posts) click this link and enter your email address.

CLE seminars should teach you stuff that’s useful, that’s a given. But we think they should be visually engaging, and —dare we say it— fun. In a few weeks we’ll be announcing our schedule for December, which is when we typically put on a two-day seminar in New Orleans. We’re contemplating doing a one day seminar in Baton Rouge in early December too.

If you want to be notified whenever we do a seminar (and also get a weekly email with all of our posts) click this subscribe link and enter your email address.

I upgraded two Macs to the new Lion operating system, which has a new auto-save feature that saves files automatically from the moment you open a new file. It also saves the various states of the file as you work on, the idea being you can revert to an older state.

This seems to cause problems in a couple of programs, one of them being Acrobat. And this is consistently reproducible bug on my two Mac machines. Here is what I’ve noticed.

When I bookmark a large PDF and then attempt to use the “Split by bookmark” option it fails to split and says that one of the files is already in existence. The problem is so entrenched that I can no longer split files “by bookmark” using Acrobat, at least not if I used Acrobat to create the bookmarks.

I was able to use a third party program called PDF Pen Pro to create bookmarks and then when I opened the file in Acrobat I was able to split the file by bookmarks. I noticed a weird behavior with PDFPen that I’m not sure is supposed to happen: when I created the bookmark the page I was viewing would auto advance to the next page. Weird.

Makes me wonder if the Lion upgrade is creating havoc with some of the old programs that haven’t been upgraded to be compatible. I know Adobe and Apple have a strained relationship (mostly over Apple’s decision not to allow Flash on iPhones and iPads). But I hope that Adobe will work with Apple to quickly upgrade Acrobat to deal with this issue.

I’ve tested both Acrobat 9 and Acobat X and the problem is there in both versions. Again, I’ve only encountered the problem when splitting a PDF by bookmarks. That’s a niche thing, but important to folks who want to break up one PDF containing many ‘documents’ into PDFs that contain only one document.

Question: “I’m a student and I want to buy Acrobat. Is there a student version?”

Answer: Yes, see this link. You’ll have to have a current student ID or other proof of current enrollment. And the education discount is applicable to faculty members as well.

Question: “I’m impressed with Acrobat Pro 9 and am using it more and more in my practice to redact and bates stamp documents.  I just received 4000 plus PDF images and am in the process of OCRing them.

My question is this: is there a low-cost in-house way to extract the to/from/subject/description from e-mails in the set? And can I build a low cost database for those emails?

Answer #1 (provided courtesy of Tom O’Connor of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center): the definition of “low cost” is the key. If you mean $1000 or less take a look at Craig Ball’s excellent article called “The Edna Challenge.”  If you have more than that to spend there a few options ranging up to 15K.   I’d look at LAW, IPRo or Digital War Room but I think much of what you want can be done in Acrobat.

Answer #2 (provided courtesy of Mike Adams of Voodoo Consulting): Your best bet may be to have a paralegal build you an index in Excel that they would perform a doc review on and then enter. Another solution would be to use Google Apps ($50 a year for each user), and create an account for this case. Import all of your PDF’s (make sure you keep them in PDF format, do not let Google convert them) and they will be searchable. So you could then run a search for a date or a subject line or an author and see all of those results.

Source: PDF for Lawyers

On the other hand, Acrobat is expensive. The Professional version costs over $400, and there is no Standard version for the Mac. I believe that every law firm should have at least one copy of Professional (to do bates-stamping and redaction). But for wide deployment, Standard is good enough.

So what’s a Mac-using law office supposed to do?

I recommend PDFPenPro, which does almost all of the things that Acrobat Professional does (including bates-stamping and redaction) for only $99, which is a fourth of the cost. PDFPen comes in a less expensive version, PDFPen, which costs only $60, and does pretty much all of the things that PDFPenPro does. It doesn’t allow you to create or edit bookmarks, though, so I would just get the Pro version for $40 more.

The bates-stamping function of PDFPenPro isn’t suitable for law firm level, but it works as a rudimentary tool. For example, you can’t specify where the bates-number will appear, nor can you specify that first bates-number will be something other than 1.

The splitting function in PDFPenPro won’t let you split documents by bookmarks, something that’s useful when you are breaking up a large scan into individual documents.

Creating a signature stamp with a transparent background is a cinch in PDFPenPro, and apply the signature is easier than Acrobat. So that’s one area where PDFPenPro outperforms Acrobat.

In general, I find PDFPenPro to be snappier and easier to deal with than Acrobat. The user-interface is intuitive and streamlined. Acrobat seems to have too many features, and then makes many of them hard to get to (especially Acrobat X). So, if you’re a Mac lawyer I highly recommend that you check out PDFPenPro.

It’s free to try for a limited period, but the PDFs you save will be embedded with a company log until you pay for the license. If you get a copy of this program you might want to spend an extra $10 and get this e-book manual called Take Control of PDFPen 5.0, by Michael Cohen.

Source: PDF for Lawyers

Why is the default printing instruction in Adobe Pro set to “All”? How many stressed practitioners forget and hit the button to find that 2943 pages are wending their way to the printer. A quick cancel can result in the program shutting down losing any unsaved activity. Best choice for default- print this page onlyIs there any way to reset it?

Answer:

I feel your pain. I’ve not had a problem quickly canceling the print job in those rare instances where I accidentally trigger an unwanted print job. I mostly use a Mac, for what it’s worth. I don’t know of a way to reset the default, but perhaps a savvy reader does and can put that in the comments.

Question:

My Acrobat X program simply will not function when I try to send the current document by email within Acrobat X.  Any solutions or suggestions?

Answer:

I’ve not had this problem, but I have noted that Acrobat X handles the ‘Attach to Email…” command a little differently than in the past. In Acrobat 9 you’d simply select FILE > ATTACH TO EMAIL and (here’s the different part) the PDF would be popped into the email as an attachment without any further steps.

Now, in Acrobat X, it opens the SHARE menu (way over on the right), and prompts you to pick either: (1) Use Adobe SendNow Online, or (2) Attach to Email. In my program choice #2 is already selected. But I still have to click a button labelled “ATTACH”. This is annoying, since I already specified that choice by selecting FILE > ATTACH TO EMAIL. My guess is Adobe is trying to remind people about its online sharing service, SendNow.

This is an annoying and disruptive way to remind people; what it reminds me of is that Adobe has a poor sense of usability. First, they reconfigure Acrobat X to move things around in weird ways that confuse veteran users. Then they make you go through more steps to send PDFs by email.

As Steve Jobs once observed, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Or “doesn’t work,” in the case of Adobe’s recent redesign of the Email attachment function.

Source: PDF for Lawyers

Question: “Why scan everything, as opposed to just some things?”

Answer: The problem with information is you never know when you’re going to need it (Lawyers know this better than anyone). So you have to have a system that captures all paper so you can find it later. Finding it later is easier if you scan it and name it logically; if you do that you can dump it in a digital shoebox and still find it years later.

Question: What’s the best bookmarking application (or plugin) for Acrobat X? I already have Acrobat X but I need a sophisticated tool to help me create bookmarks rather than simply manually. There is autobookmark plugin for Windows but I wonder what the Mac equivalent is.

Answer: There is no bookmarking plugin for Acrobat. You have to create bookmarks one at a time in Acrobat, but this is easy to do. Just hit Command + B (on Mac) or Control + B (on PC). If you can select text in the PDF (if it’s OCRd, for example) then you can hit that shortcut and it will paste that text into the bookmark name. If you’re creating a PDF from a word processing application it’s possible that if you set up the headings a certain way (depends on the program) you might be able to have the headings pass into the resulting PDF as bookmarks. Other than that I’m not sure how to provide better guidance.

Source: PDF for Lawyers

The instructions are the same in Acrobat X, except that you’ll have to click on on the Tools menu over on the right, then >Pages > Bates Numbering > Add.

Once you’ve bates-numbered the documents you can search for documents based on the bates-number. Choose Edit > Search, and then as the search word or phrase, type in all or part of the Bates numbering that you want to find.

Pretty easy, isn’t it? Makes you wonder why anyone would do it the old-fashioned way.

Source: PDF for Lawyers