P2P

41 I L T A N E T . O R G L aw firms live by documents, from pleadings to contracts and agreements to myriad other types of documents. For more than 20 years, the final form of most of those documents has been PDF. Adobe is justly celebrated for inventing the world's greatest digital document format because PDF is robust in functionality, offers tremendous security, provides perfect fidelity with the printed paper version and works across all platforms from email, document management systems and the web. And in the beginning, the only tool to work with PDF files was Adobe Acrobat. But the ILTA TechSurveys over the years show that many law firms, who are reliant on PDF documents, have adopted alternatives for their PDF creation, editing and conversion needs. The 2022 ILTA TechSurvey shows that Kofax Power PDF is used in 40% of law firms in the 350- 699 and 700+ attorney categories, and 44% of the 541 law firms surveyed overall. Everyone reading this knows that law firms and their employees are the most demanding PDF users in the world. The reason that firms can choose an editor other than Acrobat is because right from the start Adobe decided to publish PDF as an open document format. This decision allowed developers to take advantage of this powerful document platform, thereby growing the market for a new file type. This opened the door to both collaborators and competitors and created the market for alternatives to Acrobat. One of the early entrants was ScanSoft with PDF Converter, developed at the request of Microsoft in 2003 to provide a path from PDF to the dynamic editing world of MS Word and Excel. ScanSoft soon added a PDF Printer to create PDF files and offered an early PDF editor that evolved into today's Kofax Power PDF. As Lead Sales Engineer for Power PDF in North America for 15 years, I worked with all the largest law firms through very demanding Proof of Concept testing to evaluate a new PDF solution. While the primary motivation is finding the same functionality at lower cost, the deciding factor is always the critical functionality. The new product had to perform flawlessly, law firms need to flexibly manipulate PDF and they demand the final PDF files be 100% bullet-proof. Proof of Concept testing always engaged a representative subset of powers users, and the process was run by managers from Training, Support, and IT. ILTA Publications and Surveys often invites and includes SME authors from around the globe to contribute articles and blogs on Legal Technology. Please find below, a thought- leadership piece by Tony McKinley, author of "PDF Expert – Master PDF and OCR"

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