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Ernie the Attorney
Intro
Adobe Acrobat is very useful tool, and I can't believe more lawyers haven't discovered it. I think the problem is the old "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" thing. For lawyers, word processing programs are the "trusty hammer." But times have changed, and the bottom line is we need to learn how to use some new tools. Acrobat is one of those tools.
By Acrobat, I'm not talking about the free Reader that Adobe makes available. I'm talking about the full blown version that is available for just over $200 at most software sales outlets.
What does it do that is so great?
Well, for starters, it lets you have a document that you have no intention of editing (like, say, a deposition exhibit) and you can preserve the appearance of that document (by scanning it into Acrobat like an image) and then you can create virtual stickie notes that contain your thoughts about aspects of that document.
And, if the document is long, which many legal documents are, you can create "tags" which are called "bookmarks" that allow you to instantly navigate to the place you want to go. Basically, all of the annotation features make it easy for you to pick up your thoughts later, and to have them associated with a particular passage of a document. It's hard to describe why this is revolutionary, but it is. Once you start tagging documents in this way you find that the information you need is always at your fingertips, and the secret to profitting in an information processing business (i.e., the Legal Profession) is to make information "come to you" rather than you having to constantly seek it out.
The fact that the federal courts are using it and that the Reader is widely available and free will favor the pervasive use of PDF (i.e. "portable document format") as a format that is used for imaged documents. The governing body that oversees all federal courts has decreed that all federal court records will be available online by 2005. What format do you think all of those documents are going to be in?
Some Practical Considerations
Rick Talcott, a tech-savvy lawyer in Oakland, has been working with Acrobat for quite awhile and offers some useful thoughts about using Acrobat to deal with electronic documents:
How to Handle a Document Production with Adobe Acrobat
Good Additional Reading Material on Using Acrobat
I recommend three sources: (1) the Help menu built into Acrobat, which is a large PDF file with the most comprehensive amount of information that you could possibly want; (2) a book called PDF with Acrobat, by Jennifer Alspach; and Adobe Acrobat 5.0: Classroom in a Book.
You can also read the short article that I wrote about Acrobat for Lawyers that was published on the LLRX website.
© Copyright 2003 Ernest Svenson.
Last update: 6/5/2003; 10:07:19 PM.
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