FEBRUARY 2007

Customer profile: Ernest Svenson, PDF for Lawyers

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

A well-known advocate for the effective use of new technologies in the legal profession, New Orleans-based attorney Ernest Svenson finds Adobe Acrobat and PDF to be highly valued tools in a document-intensive field.

His techno-advocacy is evidenced by the PDF for Lawyers blog he launched and maintains, and his other Ernie the Attorney blog and moniker.

"I've been using Acrobat in the practice of law for about 5 years now," says Svenson. "I find it is a great tool for keeping paper at bay, and yet keeping the information contained in the paper close at hand."

"My thought with the PDF for Lawyers blog was that, as the federal courts increasingly used PDFs in their e-filing system," Svenson says, "more lawyers would discover the benefits of using PDFs, or at least want to learn more about what they could do with the full version of Acrobat."

His site seems to have caught on, and is frequently cited by other legal websites and blogs, including Rick Borstein's Acrobat for Legal Professionals at Adobe.com.

"I've been lucky, mostly in getting into blogging at a propitious time, and with the PDF for Lawyers site that has meant getting linked to by several U.S. Court sites," says Svenson. "I think they appreciate the encouragement and tips that flow from our site, and I'm happy to help send the message to lawyers who are adopting e-filing that learning about PDFs can be a good thing for many reasons, not just e-filing."

Svenson and Borstein recently gave a joint presentation — highlighting significant trends in legal market use of Acrobat and PDF including e-filing, archiving, e-briefs, accesibility and security — during a “Technology Solutions for the Mississippi Practitioner” seminar for members of the Mississippi Lawyers Association. "Rick talked mostly about the new version of Acrobat," Svenson says, "which has many features that are extremely beneficial to lawyers, such as bates-numbering, redaction, meta-data analysis and removal and improved document assembly tools."

And what does Svenson think of some of the new and enhanced Acrobat 8 features, and their applications for his field?

"The redaction features are wonderful," he says. "I really like the ability to quickly analyze what metadata is in my document and then quickly eliminate it. The Bates-numbering feature is robust and up to par with other Bates-numbering programs I've used, but it's great to have that feature built into Acrobat. Also, I like the OCR engine in the new version; it seems faster and more reliable. Same goes for the 'export to Word' function."

"Redaction is important to lawyers, especially litigators who have to produce documents to opposing lawyers," says Svenson. "Being able to quickly and easily remove proprietary, privileged, or completely non-responsive information is critical. The new redaction tool allows for that and does it in a very slick way."

Lawyers interested in learning how to use the various features in Acrobat and solve specific types of problems ought to routinely visit Svenson’s PDF for Lawyers sight to benefit from his observations. In a recent post, for example, he noted that “apparently a lot of lawyers are still creating their PDFs by scanning them, instead of simply 'capturing the text' as a print file and doing the conversion that way.” That can lead to excessive file sizes, he says, which is not optimal for use in e-filing systems.

In a previous post, Svenson gives Acrobat 8 a big thumbs up, calling it “a must-have piece of software for attorneys and legal professionals.”

The verdict is in.

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