We are now working with more online documents than ever before. In this blog I’m going to show you how to use Adobe Acrobat, an amazing tool to help you organise and collate your legal documents.
Working as a Legal PA most of my clients are, you guessed it, lawyers. If you know the legal industry well then you’ll know it has always been very document heavy. I can remember the days of working for a litigation firm and spending hours on my feet at the photocopier scanning in large bundles of legal documents for the court, counsel and experts.
I would spend hours collating the PDF’s into online bundles with indexes etc. so that it made it easier for the recipient to read through. On the other hand, I would also photocopy these bundles into various lever arch files so that the recipient could read the paper copy.
Nowadays though, most documentation is online, but who likes receiving an email with 20+ PDF’s to read? Certainly not me, it makes it quite hard to manage.
Adobe Acrobat
To make my document and scanning jobs easier, I recently purchased Adobe Acrobat and it’s been such a lifesaver for both myself and my clients.
My clients usually ask me to:
- Collate Word docs and PDFs into one file
- Convert a PDF into a Word document so that it can be edited
- Organise and remove pages from a PDF
- Put together online bundles
- Add dates to PDFs that have just been signed
With Adobe Acrobat you can do all of these so easily and here’s how:
1 | Combine Files
Combine files means just that, you can upload various PDFs, rearrange them into the order you want, give it a new file name and combine and you are left with 1 PDF. I use this function a lot with clients.
2 | Edit PDF
Once a legal document has been signed, the edit tool allows you to enter in the date. This is extremely handy for any legal work that I do.
3 | Organise pages
This feature is one of my favourites. I recently did a large scanning job where the pages were both portrait and landscape. All pages are scanned in as portrait as the default, but you want to make it easy for the person who is reading the PDF.
With the organise pages function, you can tick each of the pages that should be viewed as landscape, rotate them and save. This will make it so much easier for the recipient to read.
4 | Export PDF
Converting a Word doc to PDF is easy via Microsoft Word. However, converting a PDF back to Word can be quite tricky without decent software. Cue Adobe Acrobat. The PDF to Word export works a treat and really does copy it over accurately meaning it’s easy to edit.
You can also export a PDF into a PowerPoint presentation and a spreadsheet.
There are also other features such as adding stamps and numbering to documents, sending documents out for signature, compressing PDF’s (if they are too large), adding comments and markups and comparing to quickly and accurately detect differences between two versions of a PDF file.
The cost for Adobe Acrobat is around £15 a month but so worth it. What’s that saying “having the right tools for the job”, and if you work with documents frequently then Adobe Acrobat is most definitely a great tool to have.
If you need help with any legal document editing, converting, organising or exporting then you know where to find me:
📩 info@kelliesimpsonva.co.uk
