Tech Tuesday: Converting Documents to PDF/A for E-filing

The Judicial Committee on Information Technology (JCIT) has established technology standards to ensure the "systematic implementation and integration of technology in Texas' trial and appellate courts." The current JCIT Standard, which is available in its entirety on the website of the Texas Judicial Branch, includes guidelines for proper e-filing in Texas courts and specifically states that documents be submitted as PDF files for long-term preservation. It further states that PDF documents be created with a PDF distiller, thus saving the converted document for preservation and retaining its printed appearance. With this requirement, the JCIT addresses the practice that some attorneys still routinely engage in -- printing a document created in Microsoft Word, for example, and scanning it to create a necessary PDF file. Using a PDF distiller not only allows users to avoid wasting paper, but, by converting the file digitally, the resulting document is JCIT Standards compliant.

To save your MS Word document as a PDF, simply click File > Save As > Save as file type. By default, your document will be saved as a plain Word document with the file extension .doc. Simply click on the Save as type drop-down menu to view your options, and scroll down to select PDF. Just that easily, your document will be saved as a .pdf. Mission accomplished! However, to make your document truly standards compliant, you must take one additional action.

Once you select PDF as your file type, you will see an Options button in the dialog box. Clicking on this button opens yet another small window, which is pictured here. At the bottom of the Options menu is a list of three items related to the saving of PDF documents, including an option to select the ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A) version. Once you've checked the box for this selection, your document will be entirely compliant with the JCIT Standards, which require all documents e-filed in Texas to conform to the specifications of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which has established standards for writing, reading, displaying, and interacting with PDF documents.

To learn more about what makes the PDF/A file type so special, visit the Library of Congress online to read about their use of PDF/A documents for preservation. Two additional sources about the PDF/A format are PDF/A in a Nutshell and PDF/A - the standard for long-term archiving, a white paper published by the PDF Association. Finally, the Harris County Law Library has a new handbook called The Ultimate Guide to Adobe Acrobat DC which is shelved at the Reference Desk in our Legal Tech Collection.

If you ever need assistance with this or any other tech topic, join us on Thursday afternoons at 2:00 in the Law Library's Legal Tech Lab for hands-on legal tech training, brought to you the Legal Tech Institute at Harris County Law Library.

What's New On HeinOnline?

The Harris County Law Library provides access to several legal research databases including Westlaw, Lexis, O'Connor's Online, and the State Bar of Texas Practice Manuals. We also offer access to HeinOnline, a rich source of legal content including legal history, secondary sources, and, most notably, the Law Journal Library. This library of scholarly legal publications has always been a terrific resource, but it just got even better with the addition of nearly forty Cambridge University Press journals, including the following, to name just a few:

• Business and Human Rights Journal 
• Health Economic Policy and Law
• International Journal of Legal Information
• Journal of Law and Religion
• Law and History Review
• World Politics

The Harris County Law Library has expanded is subscription even further by subscribing to the U.S. State Package, a supplemental subscription, which brings together six databases of state-specific content, including more than 30 million pages of text covering all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The six databases, which you can read about in detail on the Hein website, are listed below.

• Session Laws Library
• State Statutes: A Historical Archive
• Bar Journals Library
• State Attorney General Reports & Opinions
• State Reports: A Historical Archive
• Prestatehood Legal Materials

Finally, one more enhancement to the HeinOnline database deserves recognition. That enhancement is a curated collection of materials called Gun Regulation and Legislation in America. HeinOnline is offering this package at a time when reliable information about gun control and ownership rights is so desperately needed. Contents include the publications listed here:

• Nearly 500 scholarly articles
• CRS Reports
• Congressional hearings
• Legislative histories
• Extensive bibliography plus links to external resources
• Briefs filed in Supreme Court cases regarding gun control

All of this new content, along with so much more (United States Congressional documents, federal legislative histories, state session laws, legal classics, treaties and agreements, and restatements of the law), is available while you're visiting the Law Library, but you can also access HeinOnline remotely from your own mobile device via the HeinOnline app.

• First download the program to your device. Click here for Android or here for the iPhone.
• Visit the Harris County Law Library to authenticate your device through our HeinOnline subscription. Once IP authenticated, your device will be able to access the database from any location for 30 days.
• At the end of the 30-day period, visit us again to re-authenticate and never be without access to MyHein and HeinOnline!

Know the Code: Programming Resources for Lawyers

Some time ago, we at the Harris County Law Library raised a question: Coding for Lawyers - Novelty or Necessity? We revisited that question a while later in Techno-Legal Practitioners and Lawyers Learning to Code. Now it's time to return to this topic again as the growth of do-it-yourself learning tools has expanded opportunities for lawyers to acquire the skill that some call the new literacy. 

There is no shortage of easily accessible, user-friendly, free or low-cost resources for developing the knowledge you need to call yourself a coder. Support from other aspiring coders is also widely available and finding a tribe of lawyer-programmers who share your goal can be very helpful. Joining local Meetup groups is an excellent way to build and stay connected to a coding community as is participation in networks of fellow lawyers who code, such as Legal Hackers or similar civic tech organizations. But where should a would-be coder begin? For a good introduction to coding, try What is Code? and then dive in using the resources below where you'll find help, advice, and support from others who are self-taught coders, including those who have transitioned to coding as a second career -- or as a career builder -- in later life. 

• Coding for Lawyers
• Lawtomated: Legaltech, Law, & Coding
• La Vie en Code
• Learn to Code With Me

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Metadata Tags

The Harris County Law Library's Legal Tech Institute offers Hands-on Legal Tech Training every Thursday at 2:00 pm. Our most popular class, MS Word for Legal Work, provides an overview of basic, intermediate, and advanced features in Microsoft Word. Some of these features are familiar to regular users of the Microsoft Office Suite, but one of the tasks, which we demonstrate in the Go Pro section of our presentation, often takes people by surprise. That task is Document Inspection and specifically the removal of metadata, a critical step before sharing a legal document with another party. The metadata consists of all the hidden information attached to or found within your document. It may expose details that you don't wish to reveal to another party, including the date, time, and author of a document, the names of everyone who has made revisions or comments to the document, and potentially even alternate versions of the content. Stripping this data may be very important, and doing so is easy. Simply click on File, open the Info menu, and locate the Inspect Document button. There you will find options for quickly and easily removing the hidden details and protecting the confidentiality of your work. 

Microsoft makes it easy to identify and remove metadata from documents, spreadsheets, and other work products created with applications in the MS Office Suite, but what about other types of files, including image files? Photographs taken with your cell phone or digital camera contain hidden data as well, including the identity of the device used to take the photo, the date and time when the photo was taken, and the GPS coordinates that identify the exact geographic location where the photo was snapped. 

If you'd like to find the metadata tags associated with a particular image, there's an app for that. EXIFViewer and Photo Investigator are two free apps for the iPhone, and similar apps are available for Android devices. Take a look at the screenshots below to see examples of the kinds of data you might discover, along with the options provided for either removing or editing the EXIF data or for captioning your photos. Depending on the app, you can also share a photo with or without the EXIF data attached. Keep in mind that not all images will be tagged with GPS coordinates, one of the potentially key pieces of evidence you may wish to identify, but when geographic data does exist, it may be just the information you need to pinpoint a person or event at a specific site. Have a look:

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Photo Investigator: Date/Time

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Photo Investigator: Map data

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ExifViewer Lite: Date/Time

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ExifViewer Lite: GPS data

If you doubt the usefulness of this information, consider the story of John McAfee, developer of the popular McAfee antivirus software. McAfee, who had left the United States to spend his retirement years (and his sizable fortune) in Belize, became a person of interest in a bizarre crime, the murder of his neighbor and fellow expatriate, Gregory Faull. In an effort to evade authorities, McAfee escaped to Guatemala where reporters from Vice.com caught up with him. The reporters snapped a photo of Mr. McAfee and published it on their website but failed to strip the geodata. This oversight lead to his eventual arrest and deportation back to the United States after political asylum in Guatemala was denied.

Your next case may not involve an eccentric billionaire on the lam in Central America, but the outcome might still depend on  your ability to find the EXIF data embedded in a key photograph. Caution your client, whether fugitive or philanderer, about the data's potential to expose his or her behavior, and then prepare an effective defense for his or her whereabouts at a specific point in time. Look for an app that shows you these potential "smoking guns" and put your new tech knowledge to work!

Tech Bytes: Technology Tips for Texas Lawyers

The State Bar of Texas Computer and Technology Section worked with TexasBarCLE to create a series of short videos on tech-related topics. The program, called Tech Bytes, launched just one year ago in the spring of 2017. Already, there are more than 40 videos available, and the collection is growing.

The videos focus on technology's role in the legal profession and its application to the practice of law, with a special emphasis on tech tools and trends that impact legal ethics and current Rules. Topics vary from simple (redaction) to sophisticated (cybersecurity) and from the everyday (legal apps) to the esoteric (EXIF data). There is something for everyone no matter your level of tech knowledge. Even the most cyber-savvy lawyers will learn something useful. In each 4-7 minute video, explore a new topic. Cloud computing, data encryption, metadata, forensics, electronic data preservation, ransomware, and the ethics of social media are just a few.   

Whether you're simply curious about trends in legal tech and want to keep abreast of the benefits and risks of using technology in the practice of law, or you're interested in earning CLE credit through self-study, the State Bar of Texas Computer and Technology Section has a Tech Byte video for you!