Many attorneys do the absolute minimum amount of work required to get their files online.  I can’t tell you how many times I got huge, non-searchable PDFs from professors and partners while interning.  Luckily, lawhackrs aren’t your average attorneys, right?

While I generally don’t like to ask my readers to rely on commercial software when open source (or at least freeware) solutions are available.  The problem is that in the case of windows, there really isn’t a comparable OCR PDF solution to Adobe Acrobat.  For the purposes that we need, Acrobat Standard is perfectly sufficient, so don’t feel obliged to spring for the Professional or Professional Extended versions.  I recommend buying through Amazon rather than from Adobe though, because you save around $40.

Once you have Acrobat installed, the first step is to scan your document.  Since the scanning process differs greatly depending on the type of scanner you use, I’ll leave that up to you.  I scanned my document at 300 dpi, but you can use whatever you normally use to make your text legible.

Now that you have your document scanned, open it up in Acrobat.

I picked a rejection letter for a shameless plug — I’m looking for full-time employment in the Mid-Atlantic and New England area starting in August!  Now that that’s out of the way, let’s start this #how-to.

Step 1: Click on Document > OCR Text Recognition > (1) Recognize Text Using OCR….

Step 2: Leave everything on the next window alone unless you’re not scanning English (in which case, click on “Edit…” and change the language) then click (2) OK.

Step 3: After the OCR is performed, you should be able to highlight and copy text.  You’ll probably also notice if you save your file that the filesize has been reduced a bit.  While this document is probably good enough to use as an attachment for an ECF now, let’s reduce the filesize even more and make the document a bit more aesthetically pleasing.

Click on Document again, then (3) Optimize Scanned PDF.

Step 4: Once again, I generally keep these options set at their defaults, but you can feel free to play with them for better results.  When you’re ready to optimize, click (4) OK.

And that’s pretty much it.  We started with a 436 kb bloated, unsearchable file, and ended up with a 27 kb optimized, completely searchable file.  Your coworkers will thank you, your SysAdmin will thank you, your judge and his clerks will thank you, and the legal profession will thank you.

Personally, I can’t wait until huge unoptimized, unsearchable PDFs are a rarity in my inbox.  Who’s with me?