![]() ![]() ![]() To edit PDFs, Adobe’s Acrobat is probably the flagship PDF software. Use of the highlighting tool may be difficult or even impossible on scanned documents. The latter is what you will get from your chambers if they send papers to you sent in hard copy by the solicitor. Do note the practical difference between a document created in (say) MS Word and converted to PDF, and one that is scanned from paper on a photocopier and saved as a PDF. In its primitive form, a PDF was a way of stopping others from tinkering with your document, but PDFs are now almost as editable as the original. The joys of portable document formats (PDFs) Or click on the thumbnail option and scroll to the end. Take a look at the index to get some idea of preparation time. The number of megabytes in an electronic file is not a reliable guide. One easily overcome drawback is that you can no longer form a rough estimate of a case preparation time by looking at the physical size of the brief. I’m sure there is somebody who can tell me what 15 minutes of court time costs, though if I find him I won’t be inviting him round to dinner. The week I began to write this article, a court spent 15 minutes trying to locate a witness bundle that had vanished overnight. There are some disadvantages, but none that come anywhere near to being terminal. And last but by no means least: your choice of car will no longer be influenced by the need to carry crates of files in a secure boot. And above all, you will save your vertebrae. You will be spared the annotations of barristers who have had the papers before you, whose markings demonstrate that either they or you have not the first clue what the case is about. You will save space in chambers and on your study floor. You will save money formerly spent on printing, couriers and top-of-the-range wheelie-trolleys. No longer will you have to travel into chambers for briefs. Most or all the tricks can probably be done on the Windows platform and other software, but the details will be slightly different. ![]() This article is written from the perspective of a family lawyer doing public law children work on a MacBook and an iPad (the iPad Pro, no less), using software called PDF Expert. At its best, it is liberating, simple, and blindingly obvious. So here is the bottom line: at its worst, e-working is a bit fiddly to begin with and you will make some mistakes. There has been a range of reactions to new e-working methods: some welcome them, others want to cling to unwieldy, bursting lever-arch files. We have now gone full circle and are back to tablets. Then came paper, the printing press, and books. In ancient times, stone tablets gave way to scrolls, which in turn yielded to sheets of papyrus. ![]()
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