P. Douglas Folk, Tip: Acrobat Professional or Standard; How to Offset the Cost of Acrobat
TechnoLawyer member Michael Commins asks:
"I was recently told by a local legal support vendor that Acrobat Professional is the only version of Acrobat to consider using in a law office. Before he told me this, I had purchased 3 licenses for Acrobat Standard for our firm. Should we move to Professional?"
Professional has some annotation features that are not included in the Standard edition that are a must if you use it for document mark-ups and send files to clients and other users who don't have Acrobat (e.g., those using the free Reader). We purchased Professional for the lawyers in our office who are doing contract reviews and other more intense mark-up work on their files.
You can offset some of the added cost of buying Professional (or Standard for that matter) by using some of the freeware or shareware PDF file converters available in the marketplace for your secretaries or other people who don't need to do anything more than convert a scanned image of a document, or Word or Excel files, to a PDF file before e-mailing it somewhere. Several capable utilities are available as freeware or shareware from www.tucows.com, although I notice one of the more popular ones, AAbby Finereader, is now sold as a commercial program for $299, which is about what you pay for Acrobat.
P. Douglas Folk
Folk & Associates, P.C.
Phoenix, AZ
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