Articles > State and Federal Courts Heading to PDF

LJN’s Legal Tech News Letter
Article
February 2004 Issue

State and Federal Courts Heading to PDF
By Harry W. Salavantis

The rules for submitting documents to U.S. State and Federal Courts is changing at a rapid pace by requiring attorneys to submit documents in PDF format. PDF, the acronym for Portable Document Format, has become the standard for accessing and submitting documents electronically regardless of the program used to create the document originally.

The federal judicial system is now in the process of replacing the court's aging docketing and case management systems in favor of its nationwide Case Management/ Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems. The new system not only provides access to court documents in PDF, but allows attorneys to file documents over the Internet.

About 25 district courts and 60 bankruptcy courts as well as the Court of Federal Claims are now using CM/ECF systems. Most of these courts are accepting electronic submissions on disk and over the Internet. Many other district and bankruptcy courts are currently in the process of implementing CM/ECF, a process that will continue into 2005. Appellate courts are expected to begin CM/ECF implementation in late 2005. (See the charts below for a listing of courts currently operating on CM/ECF and those in the process of implementing CM/ECF.)

Many courts, including the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, have adopted rules requiring attorneys to submit their filed documents on disk in PDF. Additional rules authorize electronic signatures to replace written signatures on those filings.
Beyond the judicial system, the PDF interface will continue to become a mainstay in the legal industry using a simple technology that almost all legal professionals can benefit from in their practice.

A PDF's ability to share, review, and approve documents at a fraction of the cost and time spent in printing, copying, faxing, or couriering paper documents makes it ideal for contracts, court filings, briefs, motions, exhibits and transcripts.
Documents created in the PDF format look exactly like their originals, preserving their original page layout in terms of margins, spacing, fonts, and graphics. When a PDF document is created, it can be secured so that only people you authorize can change or even print the document.

PDF files are compact, download quickly, and contain everything that the author chooses, including annotations, active Web hyperlinks, and digital signatures that others can identify as your own. PDF’s can be turned into forms that can be filled out on the computer and stored on the computer. A PDF file can be easily indexed so that you can retrieve a document by searching for words or phrases within in it. Unlike a file cabinet, a PDF file can be accessed remotely by you or anyone authorized by you over the Internet.

Distribution of PDF materials can be sent and received across a wide range of hardware and software platforms regardless of the application or platform that was used to create the documents originally. PDF documents are searchable and can give an attorney in a courtroom the ability to filter through large volumes of information quickly to locate the relevant facts of a case. Multiple documents from different software applications can be used to create a single PDF file. Once a document is received in PDF, it can even be used as content for a new word processing document. If you don't have the original document in your computer already you can scan it into a PDF just as easily.

PDF is a technology publicly available to anyone with a computer. For this reason, using PDFs as a universal archiving format is a valid argument when considering alternatives such as preserving documents in ASCII, TIFF, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and host of other proprietary applications and formats. None of these formats are guaranteed to preserve the data or the exact form that the document took when it was created. But a PDF file will assure that a broad range of users and organizations can preserve and access data in a standardized manner even 50 years or more from now.

The software to create PDFs is available from a myriad of vendors, ranging in price from $30 per licensed copy to over $400. Some solutions are also available over the Web for free but their capabilities are often limited in terms of resolution, security, document search ability and resolution, and may only create a PDF tied to a specific application such as Microsoft Word.

Many software applications such as WordPerfect Version 11 now have their own limited versions of PDF writer software built into the application.

The most popular and feature rich PDF-writer software comes from Adobe Acrobat. The program allows you create a PDF for any application in which you can print information. In fact, creating a PDF is just as easy as printing a document except you will chose an electronic version of a printer driver. In the case of Adobe Acrobat, you will choose Acrobat Distiller as your printer and give it a file name. Depending on the options you have chosen, you can digitally sign the document, determine who can view, edit, or even print the information.

Adobe Acrobat Version 6.0 gives you the ability to extract pages from one PDF file and combine them with another PDF document. You can add "sticky notes" throughout your PDF file and electronically highlight text. With Adobe Acrobat you can add headers, footers, and watermarks to each of the pages, as well as active hyperlinks you or the recipient needs access to. Adobe Acrobat is priced from $299 for Standard Version to $449 for the Professional Version per licensed copy. More information is available at www.adobe.com.

If you need to create PDFs exclusively from Microsoft Word, then MakePDF from Document Automation Developers (http://www.docauto.com/) offers a superior low priced solution at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat. Starting at $40 ($45 with e-mail integration), MakePDF installs itself inside of Word as a tool bar giving you the ability to create PDFs in a single click.

However, MakePDF will only work with Word and cannot be used in other desktop applications.
Another inexpensive PDF solution is available from RoboPDF. The program makes it easy to drag and drop PDF in a single step as well as append several PDF's into a single document.
ScanSoft, the makers of PaperPort Pro9 and PDF Converter for Microsoft Word (www.scansoft.com), provides users with the capability to not only create PDFs, but also the ability to convert non-encrypted PDF documents into Microsoft Word documents. PDF Converter is an amazing product that can replicate the precise layout of an original PDF into a perfectly formatted Word Document including, paragraphs, fonts, text labels, columns and graphics.

By 2005, most courts will have some form of electronic retrieval submission requirements in place to which all attorneys practicing before the courts will have to adhere using the PDF standard. The technology is inexpensive, simple to implement and use and can save a significant amount of time and expense associated with printing, storing and retrieving paper files.

Harry W. Salavantis is President of Resource Advisors for Computers Corporation located in Albany, NY. The company specializes in the implementation of billing, accounting, and case management systems for law firms. He can be reached at 518-381-9244 or hsal@resource-advisors.com.