Doxillion Document Converter
A free version of NCH Software's Doxillion Document Converter can be downloaded here:
The software can convert Word documents, PDFs, Excel files, and files of many other formats to the .docx, .txt., .rtf, .html, .odt, .pdf, and .xml formats.
As you can see in this example, it will successfully convert .pdf files to text files. The litigation support or paralegal will find it helpful to note that this utility will successfully transfer the headers of PDFs to text files. I have had problems with Adobe Acrobat omitting the headers of the PDF of PACER federal court filings from the text files it generates with Acrobat actions. Testing the same sample files with Doxillion showed that Acrobat's errors were not repeated with NCH's program. This is very helpful if you want to pull the dates from the headers to rename the files, or pull the case numbers to help file them.
Incidentally I had tried exporting the files from Acrobat first as .rtf files (which does preserve the case information in the headers) and them converting them to .txt files with the free utillity found here, posted on the blog of Emre Akkas, which while it did give me text files with case information in the headings, it did so in a format on which findstr did not run successfully. This was not a problem with the Doxillion converted files.