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• Posted Oct. 22, 2012, 8:18 p.m. - 12 years ago

Lawyers Like What PDFs Can Do For Them

Lawyers have huge amounts of paperwork they collect in preparing for a trial.  Imagine hundreds of photographs combined with thousands of pages of paperwork stacked all over a table.

 

 

Now imagine having to sit down and laboriously handle each piece of paper to thoroughly read everything.  Further review is usually required and the stack of paperwork becomes a major pain.  No wonder lawyers charge such robust rates.

Take pictures, for instance.  A photo album made from scanned Polaroid photographs or even digital pictures.  Once cataloged, arranged, titles and captions are added, they can be shared amongst the members of the law office easily.

Electronic sticky notes can make sense of explanations and direct you to other reference books.  They can also leave instructions for the paralegal assistants.  Electronic sticky notes also coordinate actions needed by multiple attorneys interacting on the same case.

If all the documents are in PDF format, searches through the documents are easy and multiple documents can be searched for the same term at the same time.  The time to read through the documents for review is quicker than if the review was performed with paper documents.  You can even highlight sections of the PDFs just like you can do with the traditional paperwork.

Documents and testimony from several sources and in just about any format can easily be converted into a PDF.  Case materials can even be combined into one single document for instant reference searches in the courtroom on a tablet or laptop.  No more disturbing the judge with the rustling of papers since the search is performed without a sound.

In many cases and jurisdictions, court filings can be performed with PDF documents.  And these benefits for the law office are just scratching the surface of how PDFs can add to the efficiency and security of a law office.

Law office photo via Flickr by jgclarke

• Office Life