Technology

A Top Tech Company's Outreach To The Legal Community Yields Good Results

A tech giant asked its legal customers what they need, then updated its software accordingly -- a step in the right direction, and much appreciated by attorneys.

By  
on

Adobe and Dropbox announced a new collaboration a few hours ago along with some new tools coming to Adobe Acrobat to make working with electronic signatures easier. The changes were precipitated by a survey of hundreds of legal professionals earlier this year. Last week, I spoke with Dan Puterbaugh, Director and Associate General Counsel for Adobe Systems, about the changes coming today in Adobe and the work they put into reaching out to the legal community to assess how they can better help. The full report is available here. Some highlights:

  • 52% have had to wait 24 hours or more for someone to physically sign a document in their office.
  • 20% have missed an important revenue deadline while waiting for a handwritten signature.
  • 45% have had to stay late at the office to get a handwritten signature.
  • 72% have said that their work is easier since they started using e-signatures.

Just for good measure, they also put together this page about the various laws across the world regarding electronic signatures for international firms.

Efficiency

Although I was not part of the survey, I fall into all of the above categories. Just last week, I settled a case and the settlement agreement called for the signature of the attorney for a co-defendant. I emailed him a copy of the document, but he was out of the office. I called him two days later, and he said he got the email and everything looked in order and he would print it out, sign it, scan it, and email it back to me later that day. The next morning, I still did not have it. I called him the next day and he said he got busy and now cannot find the original email and asked me to resend it. I finally received after about five days. My practice did not come to a stop. The settlement was not impeded. The problem was having an Outlook reminder pop up every couple of hours telling me to follow up with Mr. X to get that signature and hitting snooze about 100 times over five days and spending about an hour on something that should have only taken about a minute. As a solo, my week has way too many of those already, so when it’s preventable, it makes me even more irritated.

A few months before that, I had interrogatory responses due. I was able to call my client and get his final approval on the responses, but I was not able to get his signed verification to accompany the discovery responses because he was nowhere near a fax or a scanner. The result was I had to request an extension to file my responses, wait several days, get the signatures, and then file my responses.

It’s like the early 1900s when people had to stand still for 15 minutes to get their picture taken. Every time I go to the grocery store, or get a package from UPS, or use my credit card at virtually any store, I can sign digitally. The fact that it’s 2015 and I have things that cannot progress on my cases because someone is not near a fax machine is not acceptable.

Sponsored

Visual Privacy

Working with electronic documents is not just about efficiency. Visual privacy relates to the simplest form of hacking – walking by and seeing what’s on someone’s desk. Printing something out, signing it, faxing it, and then standing by the fax machine waiting for your fax confirmation sheet, and then quickly filing away all related paper creates a visual privacy problem if these steps are not done immediately every time. Creating extra paper copies of pages and signature pages is nothing more than unnecessary clutter with sensitive information and creates a privacy problem. As I detailed earlier, the Adobe esignature process is a lot more streamlined and creates less clutter and therefore fewer visual privacy concerns.

So What Are the Actual Updates

Integration with Dropbox. There are apparently 18 billion PDFs stored in Dropbox, making it the most popular business file format in Dropbox. There are over a billion devices with Dropbox installed, which is a testament to how we are moving towards mobility. The integration with Dropbox allows users to save their files directly to Dropbox and open, edit, and annotate PDFs from dropbox.com or in mobile apps.

Enhanced camera-to-PDF. This feature allows users to take a picture of a document and quickly transform it into something that looks like it was scanned in your office. Then, using the advanced mobile tools, add your signature to it or fill it out as a form.

Sponsored

New mobile tools for signature capture. Mobile tools are coming soon to capture signatures and integrate them into documents to make esigning something easier.

There are a couple of other tweaks such as improved exporting of a PDF to an Excel file and tabbed viewing to open multiple PDFs in a single window.

Conclusion

Adobe is one of the most significant software players in the legal field. They asked their legal customers what they need and how to help them, and updated their software accordingly to create shortcuts to save us time. It’s definitely a step in the right direction and much appreciated.

Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

CRM Banner

Topics

, , , , , ,