Most individuals are familiar with Adobe Acrobat, but what are some of the unique characteristics of the software that are especially useful for lawyers? YourABA asked author of “The Lawyer’s Guide to Adobe Acrobat,” David L. Masters, the what, why and how of the software.
Masters is a small-firm general practitioner in Montrose, Colo. His extensive practice includes real estate and business matters, transactions and litigation.
What makes Adobe Acrobat a particularly important software tool for lawyers?
The use of electronic documents has grown and Acrobat’s portable document format—called the PDF—is ubiquitous. You find it in commitments for title insurance that come from title companies, documents produced for litigation, disclosures in discovery and electronic court filings. PDFs are everywhere, and you can hardly practice law these days without knowing at least in a limited fashion about how to deal with PDF files. Acrobat is the tool to work with those documents.
How can lawyers use Adobe Acrobat to streamline document management and increase productivity?
You can still print documents out, stick them into folders and put them into filing cabinets, but after working with Adobe Acrobat—really finding out how easy it is—and how powerful it is, lawyers will naturally eliminate paper and store more information electronically. That will provide a huge amount of document streamlining; and once you do that, your productivity naturally goes up.
Can you touch a bit on the use of Acrobat for e-briefs?
Think about a brief that you would file with a court, say a motion for summary judgment that might include a couple of affidavits, some pages from a deposition and maybe a copy of a couple of appellate decisions. Once you finish your word processing and convert your document to PDF, you can then attach those other documents—the affidavits, discovery responses and whatnot—to your PDF. You simply build links to them in the PDF file. When the reader—in this case, the judge—comes to a point in the brief when you say, “See what Jones said in his deposition;” all the judge has to do is click on the link you created.
It’s the ability to build complex documents with hyperlinks, creating this nice package that is easy to read, that makes Acrobat a great tool.
Acrobat reduces reliance on paper, too…
In my office, when paper comes in—such as a pleading or a letter from opposing counsel—we scan it. It is then stored electronically in our system. We can still send a paper copy to the client. But these days, we just send many of them an e-mail saying, “attached is a document we've received from attorney Schultz, for your review and records.” That's it, and we simply shred and recycle the original letter. By storing documents electronically, there is a significant reduction in paper—that’s really what I’m talking about.
Are there any perils with using Acrobat? Anything our readers should be aware of?
Yes, I would offer two cautionary notes. The first is that people shouldn't think of documents existing as PDFs—even PDF files that have a text background to them, in which you can search, do some minor edits and some highlighting—as an editable document. Acrobat is not a replacement for a word processing application.
Acrobat is really an application for viewing documents that have been converted to an electronic format, whether its paper that has been scanned, a Word document or an Excel file. Beyond just viewing documents, you can also insert hyperlinks and even add bookmarks. It’s very similar to having a notebook full of discovery documents that you might go through, adding sticky notes, highlighting things or adding comments; but it's done electronically, the sticky notes never fall off and they never get lost.
But again, Acrobat is not for word processing.
The second point of caution involves lawyers who want to use Acrobat as a tool to create a searchable database of electronic documents. Acrobat can give you a sense of, “Wow, I can take thousands of documents, scan them into PDFs and search them.” But PDF documents are just pictures, like JPG files—there’s nothing to be searched. Now you could OCR them—that is, they can be run through the optical character recognition system that is built into Acrobat, and it will create a background text link that can be searched. But OCR, even if it's 99 percent accurate, may still produce one in 100 characters wrong, and there are a lot of characters on a one-page, single-spaced document. That’s too many errors, obviously.
So to believe you can create a searchable database is a false hope. You ought not to go there. The best bet is to add notes to the PDF so you can find things later based on your annotations.
For lawyers who are not tech savvy, any specific guidance for their use of Acrobat?
Start small. Learn how to open and close documents; how to take pages out, put pages in; how to rotate pages; how to use other basic functions. Once you are comfortable, you can learn how to add bookmarks, add comments and the like.
If you took 500 pages, or even a 50-page contract, and took a couple of hours with Acrobat, you'd become very comfortable with the software.
While you start small, my suggestion for lawyers in particular, is to buy the full version of Acrobat—the professional version. Acrobat also comes in a standard version, but the professional one has features the standard version does not; features that you as a lawyer will want to use.
Any last tips for our readers?
Sometimes I'll be talking with lawyers, and they will call me, “the Acrobat expert.” But I'm really not. There are still a lot of features I don't know about. I just don't need to use them. Still, I use Acrobat all day, every day.
Adobe has a wealth of resources on its Web site.
There are a lot of free training and online webinars, so I'd encourage users to take advantage of those resources.
