Thank you to Readdle for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. When Readdle was a sponsor last month, I provided an overview on their amazing PDF Expert app, which is one of the most useful productivity apps on my iPad and iPhone. It is a fantastic tool for working with PDF files in a law practice, and it is no exaggeration to say that I use this app on my iPad virtually every day, throughout the day. Every attorney should download the free app to explore how you can take advantage of it in your own law practice. Although the free app is very powerful, you can access advanced features if you purchase a $50/year subscription. In today's post, I'm going to discuss some of my tips and tricks for using this app in a law practice.
View Settings
There are three different modes for reading a document in PDF Expert. Different modes are better for different situations.
Most of the time, I use the Vertical Scroll mode. That way, I can just use my finger to swipe up and down to move through each page of the document.
In the Horizontal Scroll mode, instead of swiping up and down to scroll through the document, you swipe left and right. But the method of swiping is not what makes this mode so useful. What makes this mode useful is that you can zoom out to see an entire page at once. (Often, I use my iPad in portrait mode when I do this so that there is minimal wasted space on the two sides of the document.) Then, just tap to the right or to the left of the document to move forward or backward. This page-at-a-time method of browsing a document is very useful in lots of situations.
For example, when I have finished drafting a brief, I use this mode to look at the brief, one page at a time, in an overview. When I do this, I pay some attention to the text, but this is also the best mode to make sure that the page breaks are occurring in places that make sense (something that I often miss when I am just working with a document in Microsoft Word), that there is uniformity throughout the document on things like block quotes, things like that. I'm double-checking how the brief looks more than what it says.
I also use this mode when I am working with large exhibits, such as a PDF file that has hundreds of pages in it. Swiping up and down to move through the document in Vertical Scroll mode is laborious. But in Horizontal Scroll mode, I can tap quickly on the right side of the screen to move through the large file with ease. Sometimes, if the document is large, I actually use two fingers and quickly go back and forth between tapping each one of them, which is a great way to zoom through a document very quickly.
The third mode is Two Pages. That mode works just like the Horizontal Scroll mode except that there are two pages on the page at one time. When I'm looking at a brief, I typically want to focus on one page at a time. But if I'm browsing through a very large file such as exhibits, I sometimes use the Two Pages mode to go through the document more quickly.
Thumbnail view
The Horizontal Mode and Two Pages mode is useful when I am working with a large PDF file containing exhibits and I want the exhibit to be large enough to see it, even if the words are very tiny. But sometimes I don't need to read any of the words at all and I want to have more of a bird's eye view of the pages in the document. That's when I tap the icon at the top left with four mall boxes to switch into thumbnail view.
From here, the text is way too small to read, but I can see the overall shapes of the pages in the document. When I encounter a large PDF file containing multiple exhibits, it is usually easy to see where each new exhibit starts. When the PDF file contains a lot of pictures, this is often the fastest way to find a specific picture — or to jump to the first page before or after the pictures.
Highlighting text
When I review a document, such as a brief of opposing counsel, I often highlight the text to remind me that I want to address that point in my response. (Often, I also write a note to myself in the margin.) There are two different ways to highlight a document in PDF Expert.
If you have already done an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the document (more on that in a moment), then you can use the Highlight tool to highlight text. This is the best way to highlight a document because the text remains dark, but it is surrounded by your highlight color, be it yellow or any other color that you want to use.
Sometimes I will highlight a full paragraph, and then I will use the Underline tool to underline the most important words within the full paragraph that I highlighted.
If the document is not OCR'd, then you cannot select or highlight specific words in the document. But you can still highlight part of a document in several ways. First, you can use the Marker tool. The Marker tool is similar to the highlight tool, but it applies a color over a part of the document. That means that whatever it is covering up becomes a little lighter (and sometimes harder to read). For example, in this next picture, I used the Marker tool to highlight the word Zablocki, and you can see that the text underneath the yellow is harder to read than the text in the paragraph below it, where I used the Highlight tool:
You can adjust the opacity of the Marker to make it easier or harder to see the underlying document. I virtually always consider the Marker tool to be an inferior method of highlight a document, but whenever you are in a situation in which you want to highlight something that is not text that has gone through OCR, then it is great that the Marker tool will work even if the Highlight tool will not.
A second option that I use when I want to mark something as important but the highlight tool is not appropriate for some reason is the Rectangle tool. It is an easy way to mark a part of a document as important:
I often use the rectangle tool when the document that I am working with is a statute. Sometimes I want to highlight individual words in a statute, but other times I just want to draw a box around a part of the statute. Perhaps § 32(B)(4) is the key part, so I will just draw a box around that part.
Once you have annotated a document, if you tap on the third icon from the top right (which looks like a book), you can select one of three tabs: Bookmarks, Outlines, or Annotations. If you tap on Annotations, you will see all of the parts of the document that you annotated. Here, you will see another advantage of using the Highlight or the Underline tool: You will see on the right the specific words that you highlighted or underlined. Simply tap on those words to go to that part of the document. When you use the Marker, Rectangle, or Pen tool, you can see that an annotation was made on a specific page, but you cannot get any sense of what it was that was annotated.
OCR
Because the Highlight and Underline tools are so powerful when you are reading a document, and because a document needs to have run through the OCR process to use those tools, I often perform an OCR on documents as soon as I receive them. When I am working on my PC in my office when I first receive a PDF file, I will typically just use my PC software to OCR the document. (We use Kofax Power PDF in my office, which works great for this task.) When I have a paper version of a document that I want to convert to a PDF, I typically use another Readdle app, Scanner Pro, to scan the document and do an OCR at the same time.
PDF Expert on the iPad/iPhone does not currently have the ability to OCR a PDF file, but Readdle has already announced that this is a feature that they are working on, and it will be included, at no additional charge, in the subscription package when it is ready.
Photo to PDF
Although most of my litigation practice is currently in the area of appellate law, I also do quite a bit of litigation at the trial court level. And sometimes, such as during the discovery process, I will be provided with photographs during litigation. I often find it useful to annotate those photos. For example, I may want to annotate a photo as I am deposing a witness when the witness identifies certain things depicted in the photograph. Here is how I do that. Note that you have to pay for the PDF Expert subscription to take advantage of these advanced features.
I start with the photos in my Photo library. (For example, if they are emailed to me at the start of a deposition, I just save them into Photos.) Next, in PDF Expert, I tap the My Files button on the top left of the file browser mode, and then I tap on Photo Albums at the very top. (If you don't see this option, tap on the Settings icon — the gear — at the bottom left, then tap on File Manager, then turn on "Show Photos.") Next, tap Select at the top right, and then tap on one or more photos to select it.
Next, choose from one of the two options at the left, "Convert to PDF" which will convert each photo into its own PDF file, or "Merge to PDF" which will combine multiple photos into a single PDF file. The PDF files that you create will show up in your My Files section. I typically find it more useful to have a single PDF file with multiple photos, each photo on a different page of the PDF file, so I find the Merge to PDF feature more useful.
After going through this process, you have a PDF file full of pictures that you can annotate just like any other PDF file. The Marker tool that I described above works particularly well if you want to circle something or write words on the photo because you can still see part of the photo underneath the marker (depending upon the level of opacity that you choose). For example, in a deposition, have the witness point to one part of the photo, identify that on the record as the part of the photo that you are circling and putting a 1 next to, have the witness point to another relevant part of the photo, identify that as a different color circle with the number 2, etc. When you are finished working with the document you can share the PDF file containing the annotated pictures with the other counsel in the case and the court reporter. This method creates a high-quality (trial-ready) exhibit that clearly displays each photograph and your annotations.
When I first started practicing law in the mid-1990s, I remember that working with photos in a deposition was a huge pain. You had to create large photos before you went to the deposition (which often meant a trip to the photo counter of a drug store), you had to use special pens that would write on a photo, and if you made a mistake while you were annotating, you often ruined the exhibit. Creating photographic exhibits during a deposition using PDF Expert is infinitely better.
For a twist on this, what if you want to ask a witness about something on his company's website? You can visit the website page during the deposition and create a screenshot of the page by pressing the power and volume up button at the same time. Or, if you are using an Apple Pencil, a faster way to create a screenshot is to put the tip of the Pencil near the bottom left or bottom right corner of the screen and drag up about an inch. Save the screenshot to your Photos, and then use the steps I identified above to convert the photo(s) into a PDF to take advantage of all of the advanced annotation tools in PDF Expert.
Custom toolbar
I mentioned this last month, but because it is such a useful tip, I'll mention it again. When you purchase a subscription to PDF Expert, you gain the ability to create a custom toolbar containing the tools that you find most useful in the order that you find most useful. In all of the screenshots above, you can see me using my Favorites tab as I add my annotations. I have pre-selected the pen widths that I find most useful, the colors that I prefer to use, and the other tools that I use most often. This makes me much more efficient when I annotate documents.
For me, the custom toolbar is the #1 reason to pay for the subscription. It makes this app a custom annotating tool that is configured exactly the way that I find it most useful.
Add a stamp
There are many reasons to add a stamp to a PDF document. You might want to identify a document as an exhibit. Perhaps you want to note that this is a draft document. Or perhaps you want to put some other marker on it. The stamp tool in PDF Expert has useful pre-made stamps, but it also makes it easy to create a custom stamp.
To add a stamp, just hold your finger down on part of a document to bring up the pop-up menu. The fourth option is to add a stamp.
If you tap the left tab in Stamps you can pick from among 20 ready-to-use stamps. Here are the choices:
Simply tap the stamp that you want and it will be inserted into the document. Note that the last stamp show above, the REVISED one, automatically includes the date and time.
If you select the second tab, called Custom, you can create your own stamp. There are two ways to do so. You can create a Text Stamp, which contains whatever words that you want to type with a green, red, or blue gradient background — either just the text, or you can include the date and/or time. You can create an Image Stamp, which just converts any image in your Photos library into a stamp.
For example, I have a simple image of an exhibit sticker that I turned in to a PDF Expert stamp. I can tap my exhibit stamp, place it wherever it belongs on my document, and then use the standard PDF Expert text tool to put a number or a letter on top of the sticker. When I export that PDF file with the annotations flattened, the exhibit sticker becomes a part of the document.
I learned while I was preparing this post is that another advantage of having a subscription to PDF Expert is that you can add any specific stamp to your custom toolbar. I just added my exhibit stamp to my toolbar, so now I can simply tap that tool — which even looks like my exhibit sticker — to place the stamp on a page. Then I just move the stamp to the bottom corner of a document and add an exhibit number, and I am done.
Conclusion
While these are some of the PDF Expert tips and tricks that I use the most often, there is so much more that this app can do. As I just noted, I just discovered a feature that was new to me as I was preparing this post — the ability to put a custom stamp in the toolbar. Working with PDF files is such an important part of every lawyer's practice that you need to have a top-quality app for working with PDF files. I encourage you to download the free PDF Expert app to see how this app works. Once you start to use the app, you will see the advantage of paying for a subscription to access all of the advanced features that this app has to offer. Thanks again to Readdle for creating such a perfect app for lawyers and for sponsoring iPhone J.D.
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