Rick Borstein of Adobe was in St. Louis last week. Over lunch, we talked about Acrobat 7 and the ways lawyers use (and don’t use) Acrobat in their work.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a couple of topics in that conversation. One topic that fascinates me relates to electronic discovery in small cases.
I’m still trying to think this through but I’m coming to the tentative conclusion that Acrobat 7 might be a single tool that can cover almost all of the bases for a litigator with a case that has a modest number of electronic files involved in electronic discovery. By that, I mean a few files, a few hundred files, a few thousand files, perhaps more, depending on your facility with Acrobat.
My hypothesis is this: Using Acrobat, you can collect, gather, scan, catalog, search, produce, manage and even display files in court. You will have to dig deeper into the feature set than most lawyers do, but the tools are definitely there. Of course, before people panic, I’m not suggesting that the use of Acrobat will or should take the place of needed computer forensics experts and tools where they are needed.
Think about it with me. It offers the attraction of using an existing (inexpensive program) in better ways, keeping your work in one program rather than in many programs, and keeps things simple when they can be kept simple. That has a lot of appeal.
DISCLOSURE: Rick did buy lunch last week and is sending me a copy of Acrobat 7 to experiment with. However, I own Acrobat 6 and bought it myself, and would have bought version 7 if Rick hadn’t been so generous. I truly do not expect this to tempt me to call things in any other way than as I see them, and would be disappointed in you if you thought that it would.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]