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 | Acrobat for Online Legal Research |
| Introduction |
 | I'm a big fan of PDF files. PDFs are the Adobe files that you can view with the free Adobe Reader. I've written about using Acrobat and PDF files before. If you've been using the Web at all in the past year you must have come across PDF files at one time or another. Assuming you know more or less what PDF files are, then it shouldn't be hard to convince you to use them for online legal research. But, before we continue, you need to know that most of what I say relates to the full version of Acrobat ($240). If you want to know why it is a good idea to invest in this remarkable program then read my old article. |
| Your typical research session, and why it should include PDFs |
| Let's see if I can describe a typical online research session. You log on to Westlaw or LEXIS and you find some cases that you like, or might like (depending on if they really say what you think they say). You don't want to waste money reading the cases online, though. So you print the cases out, or maybe you are more clever and you have the cases emailed to you as a word processing document. Apparently, it has never occured to you to have the case sent to you as a PDF file. Why not? |
| Both Westlaw and LEXIS allow you to have the cases sent to you as a PDF file. That's what you want. Why? |
| Word processing documents often create problems with page breaks. But, you say, I am used to downloading the case as a word processing document. Okay, fine. But, I'm just wondering, if you aren't going to change the language in the case (you aren't going to do that, are you?), then why have the case sent in a file format that is specifically designed for making text changes? |
| Well, maybe you don't have that problem because you just choose to print the document out. You like to have the hard copy. Okay, that's fine too. But what happens when you decide that you need to send a copy of the case to your co-counsel, or national counsel, or local counsel, or partner, or client? You have to physically copy that case and then fax it, or scan it so you can attach it to an email. That's not the way to go. Keeping information in digital form is the road to efficiency and rapid transmission. |
| So, even if you want to have a hard copy, you are better off if you retrieve your cases as PDF files from the online research service and then immediately open them in Adobe and print them. The only real question is how to manage the cases that you download. And that's an important issue. You want a system that lets you have immediate access to the information you need, and yet, at the same time, preserves the file for future use. I think we can all agree that reinventing the wheel is not a sound long-term business strategy. |
| Organizing your PDF cases on your computer |
| Okay, you downloaded the cases (or had them emailed to you) as PDFs. And you want to put them to use right away. So print them if that's what you want. But I would also create a little folder on your desktop and give it a name that makes sense. For example, if you are researching a First Amendment issue then label the folder...well, you get the picture. And I would name the individual files something like the case name (e.g. "Great First Amendment Case (6th Cir 1988)"). Don't obsess about citation format. So now you have a number of files and they are stored in a folder and everything has a useful name. It doesn't take long to do this, and the payoff down the road is potentially huge. |
| In fact, let's explore that notion for a moment. Suppose you get in the habit of doing this, and then six months down the road you have a folder called "Legal Research Cases" and in that folder are a bunch of folders by topic of research: First Amendment, Evidence Law, Civil Procedure. And maybe you have a sub-folder under Civil Procedure called "Removal Issues." Again, you get the picture of where this is going |
| If you practice in a defined area then presumably you are often facing similar issues. So you will have a copy of the case already, right? So next time you can pull it off of your computer hard drive rather than paying to go online to get a copy. There are other benefits as well. But we can discuss those benefits later. Let's examine how you "clip" or "virtually staple" the cases together. |
| Stapling your cases together - in a virtual way |
| When you have research for a particular motion and you are dealing with printed copies of the cases you might often clip the all cases together because you want them in the case folder. Frequently, this is what you do when you have research for a motion. You know you will need the cases when you go to the oral argument so you clip them together and throw them in a folder. Well, you can do the equivalent with full version Acrobat. |
| There are two ways to "put your cases together." Remember before we talked about making folders and so forth? This method ignores that way. You still make a folder and as you retrieve the cases that you downloaded, or had emailed to you, but you save them in a folder that you call "Temporary Folder". You can call it whatever you want, but as you might have guessed you are not going to keep the folder so it doesn't matter. And the case names don't matter much either. |
| After you have gathered them in the folder you open the first one into Acrobat. You will bookmark that first page, and I realize that "bookmarking" is a new concept. So, to explain this graphically, down below is a link that will help illustrate what happens: |
| Note the red arrow pointing to the Section called "Bookmarks." If you were using version 5.0 of Acrobat that's what you would see (if you were using version 4.0 it would be slightly different, but the point is that you want to create a bookmark). So when you select the bookmark view you will see something like the screen below. You will note that there is a new pane created over on the left: |
| The red circle calls attention to the area that you will be focusing on. You will click on the little icon to the left of the word "Bookmark" and then you'll see something like this: |
| And you will note that it says "Untitled" and is highlighted so that you can type in the name of the case. You type in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Don't worry about citation form, or underlining. Just be thankful for what you have, which is a lot. |
| Now at this point I would like to fast forward to talk about the end result. What you are going to wind up doing (and let's say you have 3 cases that you want to glom together) is having all of the cases stacked together into one large file. And the bookmarks are going to be like "Tabs" that let you navigate directly to the first page of the case that you are looking for. How you stack the cases together is easy. But first let's look at what the process will look like when you are done. |
| The highlighted case (i.e. Caterpillar) is the one that you are looking at. Note that you are on page 18 of 26. So, in other words, page 18 is where the Caterpillar case begins. The Eldred case was 17 pages long. So, you should get the picture. We are dealing with one long file, or one batch of pages, and the individual cases are tabbed (using the "Bookmark" feature) so that you can get to them quickly. |
| Quick Review on How to Put the Cases Together |
| It's easy. First you open the first case, and then bookmark it. You then navigate to the last page and "insert" the next file. Hop to the page that it is on so that you can bookmark it. Then, lather, rinse and repeat as many times as necessary. Here are the specific commands that you would use in Acrobat 5.0: |
| 1) Open first case, and bookmark it. |
| 2) Move to the end of the document (i.e. the last page). The shortcut for this is Ctrl + Shft + Pg Dwn. |
| 3) Choose "Insert Pages" from the menu labeled "Document". The shortcut is Ctrl + Shft + I |
| 4) You'll have to pick the file to insert. |
| 5) Then skip to the next page, which should be the first page of the new document |
| 6) Bookmark it. |
| 7) Repeat proceeding from Step 2. |
| This will result in one PDF file that contains all of the cases relevant to the topic that you are researching. You aren't stuck with having the cases all together, because later on you can use the "extract" feature of Acrobat to pull out copies of cases that you want to use elsewhere (but that is a topic for another day). |
| Conclusion |
| Hopefully, you've learned that it is easier to deal with cases in PDF form, and how to work with them. Storing your cases is easy with a folder system, but even without such a system, Acrobat has an indexing feature that lets you quickly search across all PDF files on your hard drive. That's a topic for another day, though. Also, you have the ability to annotate your cases with comments. That too will have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, if you have any questions... |
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© copyright 2002
by Ernest Svenson.
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