Author Archives: joewanzala

Acrobat Training Guide – Text Recognition

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Editor’s note: this is an update on the Acrobat Training Videos – Text Recognition video post. A related post is Three types of PDFs.

Introduction

This is a brief guide on the text recognition feature in Adobe Acrobat1. OCR, which stands for Optical Character Recognition – is a process which adds an invisible text layer to scanned paper documents or screenshots to help make them text searchable. While OCR can be very helpful in terms of search, it is not perfect. The computer is interpreting pictures of letters and characters in documents and attempting to turn them into text. Sometimes, those translations are incorrect (Figures 1 and 2).

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Acrobat Training Guide – Searching Fundamentals

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Editor’s note: This is an update to the Adobe Acrobat Training Videos: Searching Fundamentals post. A related post is Three Types of PDFs.

Basic Search

This is a brief guide on the fundamentals of searching PDFs using Adobe Acrobat Pro. We will review how to run searches within a single PDF and across multiple PDFs. Searches can even be run on an entire folder of documents such as one that contains all the discovery you receive in a case. Searching in Acrobat will be useful only if the PDF files have searchable text. For scanned paper, you must make sure that they have been OCR’d first. OCR stands for ‘Optical Character Recognition’, and it is a process that reads pictures and turns them in letters and words so that they can be searched.

You can search not only the text of a document, but also any Adobe comments and bookmarks made on it. Searches can be run using either the “Find” or “Advanced Search” options. The way in which search results are displayed and what additional features may be available depend on the search tool chosen. The ‘Find’ tool can perform a quick search. With a PDF file open, display the ‘Find’ toolbar by choosing ‘Find’ from the main menu (Figure 1). There is also a ‘Find’ toolbar in the upper right-hand corner of the document which can be activated by clicking on the magnifying glass icon or by pressing ‘Control+F’ on your keyboard (Figure 2).

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When a WOTUS is not Water: Winning the War with TRIAL DIRECTOR

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Why Use TRIAL DIRECTOR?

Courtroom technology is a boon for attorneys conducting courtroom presentations. Perhaps its greatest advantage is that the technology allows you to present your theory of the case in a visual way. Research and experience show us that having relevant graphics is more persuasive than words alone.[1] A principal challenge for the defense in criminal cases is that we are reactive to the government. We have to adjust to how the prosecution builds its case in chief when putting on our defense. Trial Director’s[2] greatest benefit for defense practitioners is that it allows them to add a visual component to their cross examination on the fly. This feature is critical, as more often than not we will be unsure how a witnesses’ testimony will come in on direct, and what we may need to focus on during cross-examination. To illustrate how Trial Director can be a useful tool for CJA panel attorneys and Federal Defenders, we will review a real case I worked on, United States v. Lucero, No. 19-10074 (9th Cir. 2021). This trial involved explaining complex scientific and regulatory information to a jury. Let me give you an example of how we used Trial Director and visuals to assist with the cross-examination of witnesses – and then tied it together in closing. I served as the “hot seat” operator, pulling up and annotating exhibits under the attorneys’ direction, as I describe in detail below.

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ChatGPT: Implications for Criminal Defense Litigation Practice

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eDiscovery, or electronic discovery, is the process of identifying, collecting, and analyzing electronically stored information (ESI) in order to be used as evidence in legal cases. This process can be time-consuming and costly, as it often involves manually reviewing large amounts of data. However, advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) have opened up new opportunities for streamlining the eDiscovery process. One such technology is ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI.

ChatGPT is a powerful tool for natural language processing (NLP) that can understand and generate human-like text. This makes it an ideal candidate for use in eDiscovery, as it can quickly and accurately analyze large amounts of ESI in order to identify relevant information. For example, ChatGPT can be used to identify specific keywords or phrases within a document, classify documents by type, or even summarize the content of a document.

The introductory paragraphs above were generated by ChatGPT in response to a request to write a blog post on ChatGPT and eDiscovery. This is an example of how ChatGPT can generate text in such a way that one cannot immediately tell whether it was written by a machine or human. This blog post will provide initial takes on what the potential ramifications ChatGPT and similar Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) tools can be for the work CJA panel attorneys and federal defenders do. It is not advocating any specific position regarding A.I. technology which has wide ranging and yet to be realized implications in many fields. The goal is to provide a general idea of how this new A.I. technology might impact our work.

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Working with Email in Discovery: Processing Options and Review Workflows

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Introduction

Technologies that allow for easier review of ediscovery in native format have become more affordable and accessible. Working with files in native format has several advantages including avoiding loss of potentially relevant information, access to metadata and better searchability. Email is one of the most common of the native formats produced in discovery. This article will explore some approaches for processing email and identify a number of low-cost of tools that can assist. (This article deals with the processing but not the substantive review of emails for case analysis – for this you should consider other tools such as CaseMap, or – for larger collections of emails – review platforms such as Casepoint or IPRO.)

The tools and approaches you select will depend on a combination of three factors: (1) volume, (2) format(s) and (3) the defense team goals. While a single tool might facilitate a discreet goal, more involved goals may require different approaches with a combination of tools. These scenarios can be ends in themselves or phases in an overall workflow. This article does not try to anticipate every possible situation that might arise but will explore a few common scenarios.

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