Law Office Computing
February 2005
Winton Woods
I have talked about the paperless office for years. It is finally getting close to reality by virtue of new and improved hardware and software. Let’s start with the software. Fifteen years ago the Courtroom Project beta tested a then new product called Adobe Acrobat. The basic principle behind Acrobat was the need to be able to reproduce and distribute documents that would appear in their original format no matter what computer operating system was used. The market strategy was to freely distribute basic software that allowed anybody, anywhere with any computer to read documents created in Acrobat. At that time and for many years following, most documents transferred over the Internet or local area networks in so-called “native format” (i.e., a WordPerfect document in WordPerfect format) would often appear on the destination computer strangely formatted and sometimes very difficult to read. Acrobat was designed to address that problem.
However worthy the goal, the early versions of Adobe Acrobat suffered from a number of faults. As a result of those of defects, Acrobat never really gained the acceptance that it should have. For example, in the early days of electronic court filing Acrobat was but one of many file formats that courts found acceptable. The variety of file formats in common use among lawyers created problems for courts and agencies seeking to embrace electronic documents and electronic filing. At the same time, however, the market strategy adopted by Adobe at the time of the introduction of the original Acrobat software was beginning to bear fruit. The Adobe Reader free software allowed anyone to read a document created in Acrobat whether they had the full Adobe Acrobat software or not. Over the years, 500 million copies of Acrobat Reader have been installed on computers around the world. In many areas of business and government Acrobat Adobe became the de facto standard for distribution of documents. The Acrobat format (.PDF for portable document format) provided many advantages because of its ability to faithfully reproduce such things as color, non-text images, photographs and drawings. In the legal world, however, the use of the PDF format could not seem to gain critical mass. Legal work was predominantly text-based. Whether that text appeared in precisely the right font or formatted precisely the way it was created was in many ways not important to lawyers. Adobe Acrobat’s strong suite was not the way it handled text.
That was last century. In 2003 Adobe introduced Acrobat 6.0 which had many improved and new features that are extremely valuable to lawyers. This year Adobe has introduced Version 7.0 which improves the product even more. Acrobat now does a fantastic job of working with text. It has become a wonderful collaborative tool that provides a very simple electronic format for editorial comment. It has also become a powerful tool for Internet based research by virtue of its ability to capture web pages with a click of a mouse button. In addition, every Acrobat document that is created in text form contains a built-in search engine that operates at very high speed. Thus, for example, a copy of a statute that you have copied from the Internet in Acrobat format can be instantaneously searched without using any additional search software.
Of course, not all documents come to you in electronic format. While you create most of your internal documents in electronic format, most documents probably still go in and out of your office on paper. For those documents, traditional photocopying and filing has been the order of the day. Now, however, there is a rapidly growing practice of document management that scans those paper documents into PDF format the minute they arrive in the office. Even a document that arrives electronically gets put into PDF format and once the document has been converted into a PDF document it becomes extremely easy to circulate it to those who need to see it whether they are in your office or somewhere else. All anybody has to do to read the PDF document is to download and install the free Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com . If paper is still the order of the day, the PDF document can be printed every bit as efficiently as the original paper document could be copied and probably at lower cost. But unlike paper, copies of the PDF document can be easily made searchable by a process that is built into the Adobe Acrobat software. And unlike paper, the PDF document can be edited and shared electronically.
But wait, there’s more! The new Acrobat products (6.0 and 7.0) can also serve as a presentation system very much like a PowerPoint. While it does not have the bells and whistles that PowerPoint has, Acrobat is more than satisfactory for the kinds of things most lawyers do in the office. If you want to collaborate on the creation of a document with your staff and colleagues it is a simple matter to display the material on your computer or with a projector and screen.
Acrobat has two other special characteristics that are of great value to lawyers. The first is its ability to support the use of digital signatures that now have legal recognition and effect in Arizona and most other states. The creation and official signature of a document in Acrobat is simply a matter of a couple of mouse clicks. The second characteristic is the fact that a rapidly increasing number of Appellate courts will accept electronic briefs created in Acrobat. All you need do is “print” your Word or WordPerfect brief in PDF format and ship it off! The judges like Acrobat documents for the same reason that lawyers do: they are easy to handle and store and can be taken any where on a laptop, handheld or other electronic device. The Portable Document Format has finally come of age!
I will discuss the hardware side of the equation in a future column, but if you are anxious to get started with Acrobat consider the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. It is fast, cheap and comes with the full Adobe Acrobat software. Be aware that this is a document scanner—it is designed to create Adobe Acrobat documents. It will also create JPEG documents but that is not its forte.
If you want to know more about building a document management system using the Adobe format consider buying the ABA LPM Section book “The Lawyer’s Guide to Adobe Acrobat” by David Masters. It will tell you in detail everything you need to know about document management using the PDF format. Have fun!!