Tech
Tech Tip 5: The AI lawyer: Your Hands Can Mould Documents Like Clay – Part 1 of 2
Reviewing documents for discovery is the bread-and-butter work of the junior lawyer, even if it sometimes leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. You spend hours upon hours flipping through the pages, highlighting the key sentences with the right colour, and tabbing the key pages with the correct topic. You have an elaborate colour code. You then top it up with a comprehensive chronology table set beside the relevant extracts. You even hear your senior say:
“Print out this new set of documents for me to review. Make sure I have all my highlighter pens and post-it notes. Otherwise, you know, I cannot open the third truth-seeing eye in the middle of my forehead like Erlang Shen [a deity in Chinese mythology]. I want to look at the documents properly!”
What if you paused to consider the digital equivalent of highlighters and post-it notes? IfOf course, if “third eye” approach has worked for you for many years, even decades, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reinvent the wheel for yourself. But this Tech Tip now is for the rest of us. seeking more effectiveness and efficiency as a digital native. Is it possible that soft-copy documents can even become infinitely malleable, like clay in our hands?
One big advantage of soft-copy documents is PDF bookmarks which can be nested - PDF bookmarks are the hands with which you mould documents like clay.
For example, use nested PDF bookmarks to create hierarchical and linked summaries of any document. You then need only a single click of the bookmark to jump from any point in the summary to the full text. Put another way, you have created a point form summary where every single point is hyperlinked to the full text. No need to create a separate Microsoft Word document, write your point-form summaries, and painstakingly hyperlink the relevant text to a separate document.
Using competent PDF software, you can also combine various PDFs together, and merge the PDF bookmarks at the same time. Imagine doing this now to bundle evidential documents of the same issue together. In the combined PDF, simply re-arrange the bookmarks in order to create a master point-form summary of the evidential strengths and weaknesses of that specific issue. Your senior reading the summary can immediately jump to the relevant documentary evidence with one click. Alternatively, use bookmarks as the outline of your legal memorandum, by bundling and referencing relevant legal authorities together.
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