An important factor in making the decision about which software you will purchase is the usability, or ease of learning critical functions of the software. Software is made more usable if it is intuitive for the user and if there is simple affordable training which demonstrates how to quickly use the intuitive functions. In the competitive software market for creating and editing PDF documents Adobe continues to aggressively position itself as one of the leaders in the legal industry with its Acrobat 9 product. Acrobat 9 provides an extensive array of useful tools for the legal professional (similar tools can be found in Nuance’s PDFConverter 5).
These tools range from the simple creation of a PDF document to useful tools for law practice management such as email archiving and support for a paperless office. The litigation attorney may use the tools necessary for producing discovery – the ability to redact confidential information, including metadata, and bates number the documents. The personal injury attorney may create a demand letter package with supporting documents using Adobe’s PDF Binder or Portfolio, the appellate attorney can create the eBrief, and the closing attorney can create a Closing Binder. The trust and estates attorney may want to use the form creation for client intake. However, all of these tools are useless unless an attorney or staff can learn to use all of this functionality quickly and efficiently.
Rick Borstein, an Adobe employee, has sought to meet this challenge with his blog: “Acrobat for Legal Professionals” where you can watch his free Online Training Movies. The training movies are well done and quickly demonstrate how to use these Adobe Acrobat 9 functions. If you use Acrobat I would suggest that you watch these training segments.
