OnCue's designation wizard

It's no secret that attorneys will list deposition designation page and line ranges in a variety of formats. The same attorney may use a page / line range form inconsistently, and of course, even the best lawyers will inevitably enter page and line numbers incorrectly. Like nearly all litigation support professionals, I have spent many hours parsing through lists of designations to put them in the format required by TextMap, Trial Director, and other applications.

Luckily, OnCue's trial presentation software includes a 'Designation Wizard' which can import page and line ranges that have been listed in a variety of forms. Not just loads files in the format used by Lexis TextMap (as discussed in the Tip of the Night for May 5, 2024), or the format used by Sanction, but in almost any random form an attorney might come up with.

In this example, we can see how page line numbers entered with different delimiters (both using common delimiter characters) and common terms used in English), get interpreted as designation ranges by OnCue which then automatically generates designation snippets. If it can't tell that range is intended, it will highlight the unknown range in red:

Even when ranges are entered with extra spaces between page and line numbers, or with different delimiters for a single range, OnCue can still get them correct:

You copy ranges in, or enter them one by one, and the Designation Wizard creates the new video clips almost in realtime.

The Wizard will help you catch mistakes you might have otherwise missed, and get video clips finalized for the next morning faster, so you can get to bed sooner - the key challenge every trial tech faces.

How to add links to PDF files in a court filing submitted on a flash drive

Courts frequently request that a copy of a court filing be submitted on a flash which contains hyperlinks to exhibits which are cited in the filing. If you don't want to add the url for where an exhibit was filed on PACER or on a state court docket, and you don't want to create one long, 100 MB plus PDF with internal links to each exhibit, it is possible to add links to PDFs of the exhibits which are on the same flash drive as the PDF of the main filing.

Obviously, anytime a flash drive is inserted in a different PC it can be assigned a different drive letter. Acrobat provides a way to add 'relative paths' which omit a full file path including a drive letter, and will simply point to the same location the open PDF is located in.

Follow these steps:

1. Put both the main document and the documents you are linking to in the same folder on the flash drive.

1. Click ‘Edit PDF’ from the toolbar:

 3. Select the option for ‘Add/Edit web or Document Link’

1. Choose the option for ‘Open a web page’, not ‘Open a file’

1. Just enter the filename of the document you are linking to – not the full filepath.  Remember each document you are linking to should be in the same folder as the court filing or whichever file has the links.

Now no matter where the files in the folder are copied to, Adobe Acrobat should open a relative path – it will open the linked files assuming that they are in the same folder as the PDF the links have been added to.

I tested this method by copying the files to more than one location on a network, and also with the data copied to a flash drive used with two different laptops, and then with the data copied off the drive and onto the hard drive of each laptop.  The links worked each time.

The only problem I encountered was when I tried to open the links using an open source PDF editor (for which I did not have a full license) instead of Acrobat.  However, the links did work when I simply opened the PDFs in Edge or Chrome, so if a recipient does not have Acrobat, they will still certainly be able to open a copy of the PDF with working hyperlinks.

Flatten multiple PDF files automatically in Acrobat

The Tip of the Night for January 14, 2023 discussed how to remove hyperlinks from PDFs being filed with a court.

'Flattening' a PDF is a common step to take before filing a document electronically in order to ensure that forms on the PDF can't be subsequently altered. Courts usually view writing a PDF file to a new PDF as being sufficient to flatten the document. On its web page entitled, 'Flattening a Fillable PDF', the Second Circuit instructs e-filers to print out court filings to new PDFs in Acrobat.

Likewise the site of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has a page entitled, "How to Flatten PDF Forms", that recommends flattening filings the same way.

See the sites of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi ("What is 'Flattening a PDF?"); the United States District Court for the Western District of New York ("How to Flatten a PDF File or Form for Filing in CM/ECF"); and the United States District Court for the North District of Texas ("Flattening a PDF File").

But writing a PDF to a new PDF file, will not necessarily remove all of the links in the PDF. You can however use an option under the Preflight function in Acrobat, named 'flatten annotations and form fields' which will remove all of the links in a PDF, without doing a conversion to tiff image format as discussed in the January 14, 2023 tip. In my testing this method removes links in the footers of PDFs, which simply writing a file to a new PDF file will not.

We can also set up this function in an Adobe action to process multiple PDFs by following the below steps, which is a big advantage over the approach used on the courts' web sites.

1. Create a new action and select 'Preflight' under the 'Document Processing' menu from the list of tools on the left.

2. Under the 'Acrobat Pro DC 2015 Profiles' pick the option for 'Flatten annotations and form fields'.

3. Set the processed PDFs to be outputted to a new folder:

4. Add a save function to the action:

You'll be able to use this action to remove the links from multiple PDF files which have been prepared for filing.