CBA Bits & Bytes November 2018

Five Adobe Acrobat Features Every Litigator Should Know How To Use By Catherine Sanders Reach

Batch OCR The Optical Character Recognition functionality in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro has a high degree of accu- racy. If you receive a lot of documents in a non-search- able format, such as TIFF, JPG or scanned PDF images you can run a batch OCR process over all of the documents at once to make them text searchable. Just type “Recognize Text” into the tool search and you will get a new menu called “Enhance Scans” to run OCR on one document. Or choose “In Multiple Files” from the search results and choose a folder or directory on your local drive or attached drive. This process will convert any documents in the folder to PDF and then make them text searchable. Once you have gone through that process you can run an index and do an advanced search to find information in practically any type of file in a set of documents. Search and Index You probably know that Acrobat has a search feature, but do you know what all it can do? Type into the tool search “Ad- vanced Search” and a panel will appear that gives you options to search the current document or a folder of PDF documents. You can do a simple keyword or phrase search, as well as ad- ditional criteria such as stemming, case sensitivity, and more. Searching an entire folder gives you even more options includ- ing date range, author, title and advanced Boolean search. To make search faster and even more powerful you can use the Catalog to create a full text index of a document collection. While this is not a substitute for more sophisticated eDiscovery tools, it is a useful tool for quickly searching a set of documents with some sophisticated search criteria. Batch Bates Stamps In the same file menu as the Enhance Scans (OCR) you will find a Bates Numbering menu. Similar to the Search and OCR op- tions, you can Bates stamp a single file or a folder of files. You can customize output options easily, and see a preview of how your Bates stamps look. Don’t forget to click on the tiny option in the popup screen that says “Appearance Options” in blue, as this will allow you to automatically shrink documents to avoid overwriting the documents text and graphics. Adobe Acrobat DC Pro can be a hugely helpful and vital tool in a litigator’s arsenal if you know what it can do. Catherine Sanders Reach is the Director of Law Practice Management & Technology at The Chicago Bar Association. The Law Practice Management & Technology division at the Chicago Bar Association provides CBA members with an array of services and programming including continuing legal education seminars, technology training both online and in person, and fee-based consulting services to CBA members.

The most current version of Adobe Acrobat, DC (or Dynamic Cloud), is a hybrid of cloud features including document stor- age, a browser based version of the desktop software, e-sig- nature workflows and online review plus the desktop software that integrates with Microsoft Office and apps for your mobile devices. The program provides a wealth of features. Litigators especially should consider the Pro version, at $180.00 per user per year. Why? Read on! Proper Redaction Litigators, when filing with the court, are required to redact certain sensitive information. Some lawyers have made the mistake of attempting to cover up sensitive information by using a Drawing Markup tool, such as a rectangle with solid fill. They place the solid rectangle over the sensitive area and then produce the PDF, thinking that no one will ever be able to discover the “hidden” information. If you read a news story about a law firm having “redaction failure,” you can be sure that this is what happened; someone used the wrong tool to perform redaction. The redaction tool in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro doesn’t merely cover up text or images; it replaces the selected areas with the redaction fill you specify. Redaction is a multi-step process: first mark text or images for redaction, second apply the redaction. Acrobat automatically saves a copy of the redacted file with “_redacted”. You can also do a pattern match redaction search, allowing you to search for patterns such as email, social security numbers, credit card numbers and more. You can search across one document or you can search other PDFs by designating a folder that you want to search and redact. Although pattern matching is convenient for quickly identifying data to be scrubbed, it is not perfect. There is no substitute for reviewing a document the old-fashioned way: by reading every page closely. The John Madden Effect If you need to display documents in court you can show PDFs in full screen mode in Acrobat DC Pro simply by clicking View– Full Screen Mode or by pressing CTRL (or CMMD in Mac) + L. To get out of Full Screen mode click the “Esc” key. With the Zoom tools under View you can call out text, enlarge sections of a page, and more. You can also create bookmarks to easily go to a specific page in a document. Use hyperlinks to jump to a section of a document, and adjust the view so that it is enlarged, or highlighted. Acrobat is not a substitute for a fully- fledged trial presentation tool, but with some practice a litiga- tor can display documents from a laptop or tablet, annotate them and create an interactive display to make the documents come to life.

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