TechnoLawyer: Business Productivity/Word Processing

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Randy Gold reviews Carbonite for online backup, Jim Browning reviews Needles for case management and discusses his firm's experience with a Needles consultant, Susan King reviews Endicia's Dazzle online postage service, Miriam Jacobson compares Time59, Timeslips, and RTG Bills, and Bryan Sims shares his thoughts on accepting credit cards. Don't miss this issue.

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Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a shared online contact management system (see article below), an accounting and billing application, an online tool for scheduling meetings, a hosted blogging service, and an iPhone time-tracking app. Don't miss the next issue.

Contact Management in the Cloud

Even if you work hard to keep all of your important contacts in Outlook (or whatever you use), invariably you'll need to contact someone whose information you lack — perhaps a new client or a client who usually works with a colleague of yours. Whatever the reason, a firm-wide address book would solve this problem — and you may as well make it accessible from anywhere while you're at it.

Customer Manager … in One Sentence
Many law firms find QuickBooks indispensable, but also frustrating because of all the client contact information locked inside.

Intuit's Customer Manager is a shared online contact management application.

The Killer Feature
Many law firms find QuickBooks indispensable, but also frustrating because of all the client contact information locked inside.

Customer Manager syncs with QuickBooks, enabling you and your colleagues to access and edit QuickBooks contact information from any Web browser — and also add new contacts.

Customer Manager also displays financial data for each client, including the current balance and open invoices. Given the sensitive nature of this financial information, Customer Manager will soon enable you to apply user permissions so that you can restrict access.

Other Notable Features
In addition to syncing with QuickBooks, you can import contacts into Customer Manager from Excel and Outlook. Customer Manager also has a search engine for finding contacts using any information such as a phone number. You can add custom fields to Customer Manager such as client and matter numbers.

In addition to managing your contacts, Customer Manager also provides a shared calendar, shared tasks, and groups. You can use the calendar to schedule team meetings, reserve conference rooms, etc. Shared tasks enable you to view work in progress, and assign tasks to subordinates. The groups tool can filter information. For example, you can view all clients with overdue invoices.

What Else Should You Know?
Customer Manager for Mobile is a free companion app for BlackBerry and iPhone. Customer Manager costs $9.95/month for up to five simultaneous users. Intuit sells customized plans if you have more than five users. Learn more about Customer Manager.

How to Receive TechnoLawyer NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The "In One Sentence" section describes each product in one sentence, and the "Killer Feature" section describes each product's most compelling feature. The TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on January 11, 2010 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

Thank you for all the feedback on my series of SmallLaw columns about Adobe Acrobat. Previously, I've discussed how to create deal books, make your PDF files searchable, and archive your Outlook email. This fourth installment focuses on a jaw-dropping function known as "Typewriter."

Does your firm still have one lonely little typewriter? Do your Generation Y lawyers even know what a typewriter is? Why do you still have one? Struggling and tussling with fill-in-the-blank government forms perhaps? Filling in UCC filing statements? Typing up HUD forms for real estate closings? How much time do you waste just trying to find ribbons for that old, absurdly analog beast?

And why do you bother? Probably because you think it would be too involved to spend the time to automate the pre-printed form in Word or in Acrobat. Whatever the reason for dragging out your ancient typewriter to fill in forms, it's not necessary. There's a much better way using Adobe Acrobat's well-hidden and not-nearly-promoted-enough Typewriter function.

How to Make the Switch to Acrobat's Typewriter

Here's the idea in a nutshell. Scan any pre-printed paper form or take any "dumb" form you find online or receive from someone (with "dumb" defined as an inability to have its data fields filled in on-screen). With a PDF version of the form now on-screen, make the file searchable. Re-save the now searchable PDF file. For example, suppose you scan an IRS W9 form to report professional service fees received.

Now comes the PDF magic. In Acrobat Standard, Professional or the less common Professional Extended edition, go to the Tools menu, select Typewriter, and select "Show Typewriter Toolbar." A new toolbar will be added that includes the Typewriter functions:

• A button to turn on the Typewriter function and insert text at any point in your document.


• Buttons to increase or decrease the font size typed.


• Buttons to increase or decrease the line spacing of the typed text.


• A button to change the color of the typed text.


• Pull-down selections to choose fonts and their point size.

To insert text at any point in the document, presumably to "fill in a blank," click the Typewriter button (easily identified for everyone over the age of 40 by a typewriter). Doing so will change your cursor into one that looks more like what ancient Wordstar devotees from the early 80's will remember as their "insertion pointer."

Position the typewriter cursor wherever you want to "type" text onto the document and click. Then type away. The default font, nostalgically, is a Courier-like font that harkens back to the days of the IBM Selectric and the "typewriter look" of yesteryear. You can change it, but initially it's just plain fun to think of your completed form looking as if you had used some clanking old Underwood. When you finish the entry, press ESC and you'll switch off Typewriter mode. Move to the next blank and repeat until your form is fully filled.

Typewriter Tips

You have extensive ability to later modify your entries. You can click on the "typed" text to select it. You can then double-click into the selected text to return to Typewriter mode and edit to your heart's content (no more white-out). If you want to change the appearance of the text, highlight it once you've "double-click selected" it and then choose any of the text appearance change options on the Typewriter toolbar: graduated font size increases/decreases, line spacing to better fit the blanks, color changes, or standard font and point size changes. Click away from the selected text to lock in the changes.

Sometimes you'll need to reposition the "typed" text — placement of the typewriter cursor isn't entirely obvious and can take a bit of practice. To reposition your text, click on it to select the entire typed segment. Then position the "arrow" cursor on the selected text border and drag and drop where needed. For finer repositioning, first zoom into the PDF using the standard Acrobat zoom controls.

When you finish, save the PDF file to lock in your changes, and then distribute away. You'll find endless daily uses for the Acrobat Typewriter. Sometimes it can be as simple as filling in a "date signed" line in a contract after inserting your scanned signature or before inserting your digital signature. Other times, you may use it to fill out a multiple page government agency form.

Old Keystrokes Home

Once you begin using Acrobat's Typewriter tool, one more task awaits you — sending your Brother, IBM Selectric, Olivetti, Royal, Underwood, or whatever typewriter your firms uses to an analog assisted living facility to live out its remaining days.

Written by Ross Kodner of MicroLaw.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Robert Rice provides a detailed buyer's guide to Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs) for law firms, Wandal Winn reviews Yahoo Calendar's synchronization abilities, Tim Smith explains how to play specific segments of audio during a trial, John Crossan has an update on Stamps.com's secret low-cost plan after reading about it in a previous Answers to Questions, and Douglas Thomas explains how to copy and paste text in WordPerfect without any formatting. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive Answers to Questions
Do you believe in the wisdom of crowds? In Answers to Questions, TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers. This newsletter's popularity stems from the relevance of the questions and answers to virtually everyone in the legal profession. The Answers to Questions newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Michael Bauchan explains why and how his firm accepts credit cards, Victoria Pitt reviews Time Matters, Fredric Gruder reviews Acrobat and QuickFile4Outlook for archiving email, Stephen Hayes reviews Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows 64 and Nuance technical support, and Simon Laurent discusses his firm's fax-to-email solution. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive Answers to Questions
Do you believe in the wisdom of crowds? In Answers to Questions, TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers. This newsletter's popularity stems from the relevance of the questions and answers to virtually everyone in the legal profession. The Answers to Questions newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Paul Purdue explains what lawyers should consider when accepting credit cards, Todd Schlossberg reviews Stamps.com and explains how to obtain a secret low price, Product Director for Amicus Attorney Dale Wainwright answers a question about exporting time entries from Amicus Attorney, John Kennedy reviews Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and A.J. Levy shares his tips for automatically updating cross references in Word and WordPerfect. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive Answers to Questions
Do you believe in the wisdom of crowds? In Answers to Questions, TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers. This newsletter's popularity stems from the relevance of the questions and answers to virtually everyone in the legal profession. The Answers to Questions newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on December 14, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

Continuing with the theme of my last two columns, let's explore another enormously useful Acrobat feature — email archiving. Who isn't awash in an endless swirling sea of email that conspires to digitally drown you daily? Yes, that's clearly a rhetorical question because the answer is: all of us.

How often have you heard that shrill siren call emanating from your IT people: "Delete old email — you're taking up too much space — or we'll do it for you!" Microsoft Outlook users have never had a particularly useful or satisfying way to cull email. Outlook's archiving functions are effectively brain-dead. Either auto-delete or manually delete your messages. Or "archive" them, a seemingly pointless process that moves older email into an "archives" email folder structure, which serves only to make the email less accessible and less convenient, doing nothing to reduce the size of the stored data Outlook and its Exchange Server engine must track.

How to Archive Outlook Email Using Adobe Acrobat

Forget archiving in Outlook. Instead, look to the potent abilities of Acrobat and the PDF format as the panacea for your email pain.

Adobe Acrobat offers a special portfolio that includes Microsoft Outlook email and your attachments. A surprising number of people seem unaware of this powerhouse feature's existence. In some respects, you may find the ability to efficiently archive Outlook email and attachments even more powerful than Acrobat's core PDF making capabilities.

Adobe Acrobat adds a a PDFMaker ribbon or toolbar to Microsoft Outlook that features two useful buttons:

1. Create Adobe PDF from Selected Messages
2. Create Adobe PDF from Selected Folders

Let's assume you want to archive the contents of an Outlook "matter" folder you've created for "ABC Trucking v. Smith Corp." Select the Outlook folder in the folder pane, and then click the second Acrobat button. Let's further assume that the "matter" folder contains more than 200 email messages, many with one or more attachments. A progress indicator will appear as Acrobat "processes" all the email in the folder. The end result is a PDF Portfolio containing all the email within the matter folder.

When the process is complete, the PDF Portfolio consisting of all 200+ email messages and their attachments via live links appears. The Acrobat Bookmark panel shows each email message listed, sortable by subject, sender and date. Each email message maintains its live attachment links — the attachments also reside the PDF Portfolio. Click on an attachment "link" in an included email and the file will appear — a Word document loads in Word, etc.

This method is far superior to saving 200+ email messages and perhaps as many individual attachments. No one would ever be dedicated enough, or for that matter, have a long enough attention span, to torture themselves with those manual saves.

You can save the PDF Portfolio containing the Outlook matter folder's email and attachments in the regular folder location containing the rest of the matter's documents. As part of an initiative to build complete and contiguous electronic case files, there is no more effective way to incorporate email from Outlook in a fully searchable format. If you wish, you can delete the contents of the email folder in Outlook, thereby keeping Outlook lean and efficient.

Overall, Adobe Acrobat's PDF Portfolios offers a clever streamlined approach to email archiving. The best approach for small law firms that use Microsoft Outlook? For now, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Written by Ross Kodner of MicroLaw.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a utility that links Microsoft Word to Google Docs (see article below), a Webbook, an online application for reviewing discovery documents, an online marketing research service, and an iPhone app for your postage needs. Don't miss the next issue.

Force Google and Microsoft to Kiss and Make Up

Microsoft Word excels at document creation. But when you need to collaborate on a document with someone or access a document from another computer life becomes difficult. By contrast, Google Docs excels at collaboration because only one version of each document exists accessible from any computer. But try to actually write in a Google Docs document and your mood will quickly sour. Even selecting text is a chore. Too bad you can't use the best attributes of each word processor.

OffiSync … in One Sentence
OffiSync links Microsoft Word documents to Google Docs when you need to collaborate with others.

The Killer Feature
Some people think the Internet works best as a conduit rather than a destination. For example, would iTunes offer as good a shopping experience if it was a Web site rather than an Internet-enabled application?

With OffiSync, you work within Microsoft Office even when using Google Docs. You can save documents to Google Docs in Word format. You can even create folders and move documents around on Google Docs without ever using your Web browser. Similarly, you can share documents with others through Google Docs using your Outlook address book.

Other Notable Features
OffiSync enables you to set permissions for viewing and editing documents. If you share more than just the occasional document, you can also use OffiSync in conjunction with Google Sites, an extranet-like application with more flexibility than Google Docs. For example, Google Sites offers virtual file cabinets that you can use for a specific matter. You can apply the same security settings to every document stored in the cabinet.

Other features include the ability to search your Google Docs account, integration with Google Web and Image Search, and document comparison and change management.

What Else Should You Know?
OffiSync works with Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007. You can choose from two versions — Standard or Premium. OffiSync Standard, which is free, lacks native file support and Google Sites integration. OffiSync Premium costs $12/year or a one-time fee of $30. Learn more about OffiSync.

How to Receive TechnoLawyer NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The "In One Sentence" section describes each product in one sentence, and the "Killer Feature" section describes each product's most compelling feature. The TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on December 7, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

Another SmallLaw column, another Acrobat tip. Below you'll learn how to transform a piece of paper into a fully searchable, text-based PDF file. You can then search through these files using any desktop search software, litigation review software, or document management system, including many practice management systems with DMS capabilities. Also, you can copy and paste text from these documents into any other application. Both of these functions rely on OCR — optical character recognition.

Acrobat's Succeeds Through a Less Is More Approach …

The process of OCRing documents is hardly a new concept, yet it remains one dreaded by most legal staffers, often requiring a lot of manual labor. Even today, in an era of significant hardware horsepower and versions of OCR software well into the "teens," results are often mixed — after an aggravatingly slow process.

The reason is simple — recognizing the text itself isn't especially technically challenging any longer — all OCR products handle this function with aplomb. But the process of recognizing all those little black marks on a page and then having to create a Word document that matches the layout and formatting of the source document remains elusive.

Since version 7, Acrobat has included built-in text recognition. Acrobat is much more efficient than dedicated OCR software. It only needs to recognize text — the easier part of the equation. Acrobat recognizes the text, and then stores a list of words in an index "beneath" the visual surface layer of the PDF file. This indexed word list is then accessible and searchable by desktop search and document management tools. Acrobat isn't encumbered with the task of creating a word processing file so the process is faster and yields copy-able and paste-able text, ready to insert into any other application. After all, most of the time, the need is limited to leveraging the text from the source document, not the formatting.

When scanning paper, the resulting PDF is an "image": essentially a digital photograph of the source paper. There is no useable or selectable text in an image PDF. Some scanning software has the ability to both scan and convert documents into searchable PDF files in a single step. In most situations, however, this approach isn't desirable, at least when applied to every document. The reason is efficiency — conversion of an image PDF takes much more time than merely scanning to an image PDF format. The better approach is to individually select the PDFs you wish to make searchable, on an as-needed, ad hoc basis.

Acrobat Standard and Professional Edition convert image PDF files to searchable versions one document at a time. Both Acrobat Standard and Professional Edition have the ability to make batches of PDFs searchable — via selection of multiple documents within a folder or entire folders. The latter approach might seem appealing, but the process can be so time-consuming that a you may lose functionality of your PC for hours. There are better approaches to batch conversion discussed below.

How to Make Scans Searchable in Acrobat 9 …

The process of searchable PDF conversion in Acrobat 9 Standard or Pro is as follows:

1. Scan the paper document or open an existing PDF.


2. Go to the Document menu and select "OCR Text Recognition," and then "Recognize Text Using OCR" from the submenu.


3. From the Recognize Text dialog box, the option for "All Pages" is the default — click OK to start the process.


4. A progress indicator will appear in the bottom right corner of the Acrobat display, showing the conversion of each page into searchable format.


5. When the progress indicator disappears, the process is complete — just remember to re-save your PDF files.


6. The file is now a searchable, or in AdobeSpeak, an "accessible" PDF — ready for you to highlight and select text that can be copied/pasted, or ready to have its text found in a variety of different types of text searches.

To convert a batch of files, the process is similar, with the variation as follows:

1. Instead of selecting Recognize Text Using OCR from the OCR Text Recognition menu, instead select "Recognize Text in Multiple Files Using OCR."


2. From the "Paper Capture Multiple Files" dialogue box, click the "Add Files" button and select the option to either Add Files or Add (entire) Folders.


3. Navigate to the files or folders desired and they'll be added to the batch for processing.


4. Click OK and then wait for the batch to complete. Acrobat will automatically save the newly searchable files.

A third party product called Autobahn DX from the UK-based company Aquaforest can streamline the batch searchable conversion process considerably. With Autobahn DX installed on a Windows Server, the network version of the software can run automatically at scheduled times. The program will identify all image PDF files in the designated folders and convert them to searchable PDFs — without tying up anyone's PC or wasting a staffer's valuable time. While not inexpensive at $2,999 (including 12 months of software maintenance and support), many small firms have found the cost reasonable versus the value of staff time otherwise wasted baby-sitting Acrobat's resource-hungry, workstation-based batch conversion process.

The Bottom Line …

Searchable PDF files are infinitely more useful in the daily grind of law practice than mere image PDF files. Whether converting files individually or in batches, searchability and copy-ability open up a broad range of text-handling opportunities you would otherwise miss.

Written by Ross Kodner of MicroLaw.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Answers to Questions: Eric Fagan shares six tips for new lawyers, Steven Schwaber discusses an alternative to postage meters, Tom Trottier provides a few tips for permanently destroying a hard drive, Brad Jensen shares his thoughts on the future of digital media, and Kerry Hubick reviews Gadwin's PrintScreen utility. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive Answers to Questions
Do you believe in the wisdom of crowds? In Answers to Questions, TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers. This newsletter's popularity stems from the relevance of the questions and answers to virtually everyone in the legal profession. The Answers to Questions newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.