By Allison McAndrew
The Daily Record Newswire
With legal recordkeeping becoming increasingly digitized, the need for paper documents has diminished significantly. But many lawyers still cling to the often large and cumbersome paper brief.
Electronic briefs — PDF files created from regular Microsoft Word documents using Adobe Acrobat — are the next frontier for the legal profession, according to Brett Burney of Burney Consultants LLC in Ohio, technology editor for GP Solo online magazine.
E-briefs are easy to create, easy to use - especially for weary judicial clerks — and save paper. E-briefs are also easier to e-mail, 100 percent searchable and can save you hours of time, says Burney.
Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when you’re creating e-briefs:
— Keep it simple.
If you’re just getting started, the easiest approach is to create a paper brief and then convert it using the “Convert to PDF” option in Word, says Burney. Your e-brief will still be completely text searchable.
— Handwritten notes can complicate matters.
Documents that cannot be electronically converted must be scanned. If you have a few handwritten portions or pages with signatures, you can use the “Replace Page” option in Adobe Acrobat to integrate the scanned page into your electronically converted PDF file, says Burney.
But “if your brief contains mostly handwritten pages, you can’t convert those. In that case, it’s more advisable to scan the entire printed document,” he says.
To do this, you need to minimize the file size by using either the “Optimize Scanned PDF” or “Reduce File Size” options, and then make it text-searchable using “Optical Character Recognition.”
— Bookmarking can be an effective tool.
“PDF bookmarks mirror your table of contents,” says Burney, “but they’re always visible and able to be quickly clicked to go to a specific section. Instead of an opposing counsel, a court clerk or a judge needing to flip between tabs, the bookmarks do the same job but much, much easier.”
— If you still want to provide a paper brief, offer your e-brief on a disc.
This approach “gives judges and their clerks to option to search within the PDF or the paper document,” notes Burney. “Giving them that choice is incredibly effective and cuts down on the frustration of flipping between large stacks of paper.”
— Get help if you need it.
If you’re uncomfortable with PDF technology, there are consultants and copy centers that can help you or make the document for you, such as Kroll Ontrack’s iBrief, Trial brief Pro, or Brief-Lynx, says Burney.
And Adobe’s blog “Acrobat for Legal Professionals” offers step-by-step instructions for password-protecting PDFs, adding bookmarks and other helpful features.
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