Adobe Acrobat X Pro – Now with Document Swagger

Adobe invited Legal Practice Intelligence to its Sydney HQ in Chatswood as part of a campaign to remind legal professionals about the products that it manufactures. Should small law firms be buying these products?

Plied with muffins and apple juice and no other inducements, Legal Practice Intelligence's verdict on Acrobat X Pro? Buy, buy, buy!

The reason for the strong recommendation is as much emotional as rational.

Rational

On the rational side, there are dozens of things you can do with Acrobat X Pro (that's version X). You probably already know that you can edit and combine PDFs, remove metadata and lock-down documents.

Did you also know that with Acrobat X Pro you can:

• Combine all types of files into a Portfolio which keeps together individual attachments to an email; 

• Insert rich media - like videos – into PDFs;

• Engage in document collaboration;

• Do version comparisons and

• Remove private and confidential portions of documents with a black marker type effect.

Need more boxes to tick? With Acrobat X Pro you can:

• Create fillable PDF forms

• Set up controlled and automated workflow / action steps as part of PDF creation and

• Establish a paperless office.

Paperless

No longer is the centrepiece of a paperless office the physical scanner. A paperless office used to be highly dependent on expensive scanning equipment. Now, more than ever before, a paperless office is a function of software.

Acrobat X Pro can create searchable ISO compliant PDFs from different types of scanned files including from documents that have text in the form of images.

Price

You can see that there are plenty of rational reasons for investing in a copy of Acrobat X Pro. The current price of Adobe Acrobat X Pro is A$644.55 plus GST. A version upgrade starts at around 44% of this cost.

Should you try to save about A$213 (plus GST) by compromising with Acrobat Standard instead of Pro?

Emotional

Here's where the emotional part of the buying decision comes in. Is it a good idea to invest in software for emotional reasons? Perhaps emotional is not the right word. Better words might be confidence and capability; add risk management and security. We like to summarise all of these with the term 'document swagger'.

Client matters that in previous times were a form of paper warfare have now become electronic document warfare - particularly when you have larger law firms or corporate parties involved.

When you possess a degree of experience and competency with Acrobat then you can consider yourself to be fully prepared for any outbreak of electronic document conflict or collaboration. You won't have to be the one cowering with requests such as "could you please do me a favour and send a Word version of that document?"

Some of the individual features in Acrobat Pro can be sourced from other software companies at a lower price and some features may even be available for free. However, when it comes to a core value-adding activity for law firms such as working with documents, there is far less justification for trying to save one or two hundred dollars, let alone risking outcomes with free software.

Legal Practice Intelligence's conclusion: If you want your law firm to have document swagger then invest in Acrobat X Pro.

You can view more details about Acrobat X Pro's functionality here.

Read Acrobat's blog written specifically for legal professionals http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/

5 September 2011

© 2011 Legal Practice Intelligence

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