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Need to keep clean files & work files
If you are going to use Acrobat to handle your litigation documents, the absolute first thing to recognize is that documents are not just documents; they are also evidence. Thus, if you make a comment on a page of an Acrobat file or if you highlight or underline something, you are changing the evidence and may well have problems getting the evidence admitted at trial.
The solution, therefore, is keep two sets of documents, one clean and one containing your work product. I would recommend that you adopt a naming convention geared towards heading off a possible discovery request. For example, you could have one set of documents called, "Medical Records" and a second set called, "Medical Records Work Product." If you only have one set of records, you could find yourself in the position of having to turn over a set of documents that contain your comments etc.
Summation and some of the other programs get around this problem by creating a series of masks that are layered over the image. These masks are entirely separate from the image itself and contain all of the work product. That is emphatically not the case with Acrobat. If you make a comment in an Acrobat file, you are changing the image of the document itself. If (and only if) you have OCR’ed the text in an Acrobat file, you can then highlight the text of the documents, but that also causes a change in the file itself.
Highlighting text might seem like a great idea to draw the jury’s attention to a particular part of the document, but if you don’t keep a "clean" file to present as evidence, your opponent’s computer expert could inform the jury that you, the lawyer, have modified and changed the evidence. Better not to be in that position in the first place. Use "clean" and "work product" files.
© Copyright 2002 Ernest Svenson.
Last update: 3/9/2002; 3:18:24 PM.
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