Home Office Lawyer

New Acrobat has tools for lawyers

Brett Burney reports in Law.com on the new Acrobat 8.0, concluding that it has some great tools for lawyers.' Among them, a true redaction tool and built-in Bates numbering.

Source for Post PDF for Lawyers.

Bates Numbering Your Documents

I have been trying out a great little Automator Action for Mac OS X Tiger called Number Stamper 1.0. It is from Bee Documents.

The image at the right shows what it actually looks like on one of my documents. It was so easy to do that anyone can do it.

As described by Bee Documents:

Number Stamper is an Automator Action for Mac OS X Tiger that adds searchable number stamps to PDF Documents. Common practice for legal case documents, bates numbering is useful for the organization of all types of document sets. Numbered pages allow you to track documents in a database and match duplicates to originals when files are printed out or copied.

Number Stamper is perfect for stamping scanned document archives. Scan your documents to PDF, then stamp them with an electronic bates number. Stamps created with Number Stamper can be searched using Apple's Spotlight feature. Never lose a document again!

This is just one more example of what one can do with a Mac in a law office. And it is so easy to do.

Executives have a Love/Hate Relationship with Mobile Tech

Sometime back I did a POST about being too connected. It would seem some executives may feel the same.

"According to a recent survey of 2,300 global executives conducted by Korn/Ferry International, 77 percent of respondents believe that mobile communications devices (phone, handheld, laptop or pager) primarily enhance their work/life balance, rather than impede it.

However, when these same people were asked whether they believe they spend too much time using their communications devices, 38 percent strongly agreed.

A large majority (81 percent) of the executives surveyed said they are connected to work through some form of mobile device at all times."

There is even talk now about some companies being sued for causing information and communication addiction. Unfreaking believable.

Source for post: Brighthand

Going to Paperless Office

There has been some great stuff recently about the PaperLESS law office.

Dave Swanner of the South Carolina Trial Law Blog and who I would like to meet in person someday has a great post about the PaperLESS Office. Dave's source for his post is John Powers. Good stuff!!!!

One of my favorite blogs, Stark County Law LIbrary Blog has a post titled, Whatever Happen to the PaperLESS Law Office. Tom Collins points out some problems some firms are even having in allowing electronic documents to remain just that.

And than a week or so ago I received an email from Richard Keyt about his paperLESS office called A Simple Inexpensive way to Create a Paperless Law Office.

If any of you have your own stories about your paperLESS office, please post a comment here and we can keep the conversation going.

Managing an electronic case file

Ernest Svenson has a great post today at PDF for Lawyers about his paperless approach to his case files. He also includes a link to a PDF of a talk he did from the perspective of a litigator.

Ernie's approach is very similar to my own. I encourage you to take a look at his and give it some thought. I have been using this method for some time and it works great. It is an approach anyone that uses a home office must look at. When working from a home office, we have limited space available and this is one way to control that problem.

Electronic filing in federal courts

This post from PDF for Lawyers only makes me wish that our state's district courts would move a little faster to develop a system similar to the one the Fed's are using now.

Electronic filing is the way of the future, but it's also the way of the present since CM/ECF is now in use in 89% of the federal courts: 87 district courts, 92 bankruptcy courts, the Court of International Trade, and the Court of Federal Claims.' 'A principle feature of e-filing is that all attorneys are notified by email when an e-filing occurs.' What does the notice of electronic filing look like?' It looks like this. (PDF file, with explanation of what happens once an electronic notice is sent out).

(Via PDF for Lawyers.)

Technorati Tags: Paperless Office, PDF, PaperLESS

How do I shrink the page size of a PDF?

How do I shrink a PDF file? Not file size, mind you, but the physical page size.

I hear this question with some regularity!

Some courts have very strict requirements for document margins, print area, and so on. For example, a court or government agency may require that Bates stamps appear 1/2 inch from the bottom margin of the page or that each page must have a one-inch of margin all the way around.

Unfortunately, lawyers and their firms encounter a variety of files that enter litigation or other processes that don't meet these standards. For example, you might receive a drawing- or scan of a drawing- that goes nearly edge to edge. Or, perhaps, you receive a document that is an odd size, say 9' by 12' or something quite a bit smaller than a standard letter-sized page.

You have a challenge. You need to turn these digital files into a PDF and still meet court/agency requirements.

In the old days, you'd throw these on a photocopier, but it doesn't seem very efficient to print and rescan your documents turning them into big images.

What to do?

No Shrinking Violet

Unfortunately, Acrobat doesn't directly let you shrink your pages. But, with this workaround, you can easily accomplish what you need.

Let's say you have an 8.5 X 11 page where the image area is located too close to the bottom of the page.

For example, this 43K PDF room map originally produced in Visio.

1) Go to Document-->Crop Pages

2) In the 'Change Page Size' area, click the 'Custom' radio button.

3) Set the Width to the current width of your page to 8.5. Set the Height to 12.

4) In the Page Range section below, choose All if you will resize multiple pages.

5) Click OK

Didn't that just make it larger?

I know what you're thinking, this makes the document larger, not smaller . . . True, but here's what to do next:

If you only need to print the document, choose File-->Print and change the Page Scaling to 'Reduce to Printer Margins'

If you want to permanently reduce the size of the document, just choose 'Reduce to Printer Margins' and print to the Adobe PDF print driver.

Now, you can Bates stamp your document or include it in other document collections.

By the way, use this same trick if you want to make page sizes bigger.

This example nicely shows the process.

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(Via Acrobat for Legal Professionals.)

Technorati Tags:
Paperless Office, PDF, PaperLESS

Acrobat for Legal Professionals

Here is a new blog concerning PDF's for lawyers called Acrobat for Legal Professionals. I have set it to my RSS reader and will following future post with interest.

Tags: Home Office Solo Tips