In today’s world documents are created electronically,
edited electronically, sent to the court and other parties electronically, but
often when they get to the receiving attorney’s or judge’s desk – they are
printed out. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, and that print button
is always there for you, but attorneys and judges (yes, even judges I know) are
increasingly doing their reading and reviewing on their computers. Saving
trees by eFiling and eServing is great, but we can all save even more by
continuing the process electronically.
In the past printing was necessary if you wanted to review
your document away from your desk, but then came wi-fi and laptops to use
around the house or office, and eventually the coffee shop and many other
places. Now it’s getting even easier with “netbooks” where you can pull
up your documents electronically almost wherever you can get a mobile phone
signal. Attorneys can also download their documents to eBook readers like
Amazon’s Kindle (I know some attorneys who don’t like to stare at the screen
for hours reading documents, but the Kindle’s “e-Ink” screen can really change
your mind and is very easy to read. Newer displays are also much easier
on the eyes than some of the older CRTs.) Soon Apple’s iPad will make
things even easier and more convenient to the road reader. It is
essentially an iPhone with a 9.7” screen. You can’t talk on it, but you
can get a data plan for it, just like netbooks (you may have heard it won’t do
Adobe Flash, but don’t worry it still supports Adobe PDF).
Reading a document on your computer is easy, but let’s talk
about reviewing that document, highlighting, and making notes. For most
of the below, you will need the full version of Adobe Acrobat (Pro).
Obviously Adobe PDF is the format most documents are
received in, but often you don’t know if they have been converted
electronically or scanned in as an image. If they are fully electronic
from start to PDF conversion, you can begin immediately with the below tools.
If not, it’s very easy to convert it to text so that you can
highlight, copy/paste and more easily make notes. Click Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text
Using OCR… > Make sure “All pages” is selected > Click OK. The process usually takes a couple seconds
per page and then you are ready to use the text highlighting tool.
Next, right click on the toolbar at the top and click
“Comments & Markup” and “Select & Zoom”
Now the comment and markup tools will appear next to or below your other
buttons.
In the middle row, click the select text button (the picture
that looks like a capital “I”
and a mouse arrow). Now you are ready to
begin.
To Copy/Paste text,
click and drag over the text you wish to copy, then right click and click copy
(or press Ctrl-C), then go over to your word document or email and right click
and click Paste (or Ctrl-V). You can
also highlight the text you selected
by right clicking and choosing “Highlight Text (Comment).” You will also see a number of other options
including: Replace Text, Add Note to Text, Underline Text and Cross Out Text.
The “Add Note To Text
(Comment)” option is very useful for adding comments and notes to the
document to share with others. You can
simply choose it and begin typing a note in a box.
To more quickly highlight
text in your document, first click the highlight button that looks like a
yellow pencil and a yellow “T” and drag over the text you wish to
highlight. The text is then highlighted.
The “Text Edits”
button on the Comment & Markup toolbar is also a great feature that allows
you to click in the document and immediately add a note or select text and
click delete or backspace to cross it out.
When you are finished editing just save your PDF (File >
Save As) or to save time, click the envelope icon on the File toolbar and it
will open a new email and attach the document to it!
Play around with these tools and post below to share any
other tips and tricks for editing and reviewing PDFs.
--Dean E. Merritt, Esq.
