How Today's Newly Announced Acrobat Features Will Help Us Be Efficient

Making Acrobat easier and more intuitive helps lower the hurdles most attorneys face in making the transition to a paperless office.

Now Adobe is even easier to use.

Now Adobe is even easier to use.

Late last night, Adobe announced some of the new enhancements coming soon to Acrobat, almost a year after they released the current version. Those announcements were on a blog post here and in the new features page here. I had an opportunity last week to speak to the people at Adobe about the new changes and watch the new updates in action. Here’s how they can help us run our law practices more efficiently.

A Little Background

I mentioned last week that Adobe is an integral part of my law office. It’s the tool that I use to review and annotate all of my files. Documents come into my office, I scan them, run text recognition on them, and use the review tools in Acrobat to annotate my files. In particular, I like to use the book mark feature instead of putting post-its sticking out of the side of my paper copies. I also like to use the highlight tool to markup documents because I can open a menu that gives me a list of my highlights and I can jump straight to the pages with all of my highlights. I can redact, put Bates labels on my documents, and I can do text searches across entire folders of scanned files. It’s simply a much easier way than fussing with large stacks of paper.

Enhancements to the Highlight Tool

Until now, the highlight tool has had one major drawback — it only works on areas of the document that where it recognizes the text. This would pose two problems for me: 1) I need to run the text recognition tool before I can start reviewing it, and it can take some time in large files; 2) My system of highlighting is paralyzed when I have handwritten information.

For example, if I have a medical record and it has a patient intake form or a nurse’s flowchart, or if my client is filling out forms, those handwritten entries cannot be highlighted. Let’s look at this example of a document with handwriting and printed text:

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When I try to use the highlighter, I get this error that I need to convert it to searchable text first.

When I try to use the highlighter, I get this error that I need to convert it to searchable text first.

 

After I run the text conversion, when I drag my highlighter across the page, it picks up some of the hand-written words, but not all of them. It also picks up a bunch of noise in the document as words.

After I run the text conversion, when I drag my highlighter across the page, it picks up some of the hand-written words, but not all of them. It also picks up a bunch of noise in the document as words.

 

I cannot go back and highlight the words that I did not get the first time. Those words are not recognized as text, so I can not put a yellow highlight behind them.

I cannot go back and highlight the words that I did not get the first time. Those words are not recognized as text, so I can not put a yellow highlight behind them.

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One of the biggest new enhancements for me is going to be the upgrades to the highlighting tool. No more needing to run text recognition on files before you start highlighting. Gone are the days of “I’ll run text recognition over my lunch break and hopefully I can start using the highlighter when I get back.”

New simple touchscreen highlighting capabilities

New simple touchscreen highlighting capabilities

The New Adobe Sign

Having to rely on ink signatures can cause two problems: 1) It’s inconvenient to get a PDF, print out the signature page, sign it, scan it, and then reassemble the PDF with the scanned signature page; 2) If you are away from the office, you might not be in a location where it is even possible to print and rescan.

E-signatures are extremely handy. Every time you sign for a package from UPS of FedEx, or sign an electronic credit card reader, you are taking advantage of the convenience of electronic signatures.  Along with the new updates, come enhancements to Adobe’s electronic signature tools, which is now rebranded as Adobe Sign. Along with the suite comes upgraded mobile apps for your phone.

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If I am in a deposition and my paralegal sends me a subpoena I need to sign or I’m trying to get a pleading out the door, but it needs my signature and I am out of the office, things are going to get held up. Being able to open a document on your phone, add your digital signature, ad send the document back, as quickly as you can browse Facebook on your phone, is going to be a tremendous help.

Improved Integration

I am a OneDrive user. A lot of my lawyer friends like to take advantage of the enhanced security features in Box. Now, these services are going to be integrated into Adobe Acrobat, allowing you to access your cloud files and save to your cloud files directly from the app.

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Conclusion

Overall, one of the largest stumbling blocks to attorneys going paperless is that attorneys don’t know how to fully use the tools of that environment. If you want to mark up a stack of paper, you grab a highlighter and you start marking up the document. You put flags and tabs on the document to help you find key pages later. Going digital has a little bit of a learning curve. Making the tools, like Acrobat, easier and more intuitive, help lower the hurdles most attorneys face in making that transition.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technologysection. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitterhere or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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