I am normally skeptical when it comes to "vendor" panels or demonstrations, but Rick Borstein of Adobe did such an entertaining demo of Adobe 9.0 for lawyers at the Canadian Law & Technology Forum last week that was also useful and showed a number of improvements to the product.
His blog – Adobe for Legal Professionals – provides lots of great tips (I learned more about the annoying problem when OCR'ing with Adobe when you get this message: "Acrobat could not perform recognition (OCR) on this page because the page contains renderable text." – Rick mentioned that the newest version of Adobe can better "ignore" your renderable text (often footers or headers) so you will not see that error).
The more important version 9.0 Pro features include:
- proper online redacting of passages in documents (including the ability to redact documents in batch, having the software look for patterns or telephone numbers or SINs). Warning here: if you only "blackout" the text you are usually not removing the text, which still might be searchable, hence the need for a proper redaction tool.
- the ability to create what are called PDF Portfolios which combine any number of documents into a single PDF portfolio document that can act much like a "closing book" library to send to a client of all the important transaction documents
- improved review workflow when sharing documents for commenting
- comparing of two different PDF documents to spot the changes
- better Bates numbering
- improved OCRing of documents (called "Clear Scan")
The foregoing is not a very good description and I do not mean to be seen promoting any particular product, but I really thought Version 9.0 Pro had a lot of useful features for lawyers (although it is expensive . . . .).
Do you or does anyone you know use Adobe's capacity to generate digital signatures and certificates, to authenticate the source and the integrity of the documents? I have seen suggestions that this technology could support electronic notarization. Does this make sense to Slawyers?