The new version of Adobe Reader is free.  A full license for the Standard version of Acrobat 7 is $299.  A Standard version upgrade is $99.   The Professional version of Acrobat 7 is $499 per license, and the Professional upgrade is $159.   We don't have any connection with Adobe, so please don't contact us at CaseSoft regarding purchasing Acrobat licenses or upgrades.

With the possible exception of one new feature discussed below, we believe most users can obtain the key benefits of Acrobat 7 by using the less expensive Standard version.  The majority of features that are exclusive to the Professional version are of importance to technical types such as engineers and architects, but not to trial teams.  You can make your own determination on the Standard v. Professional issue by reviewing a feature comparison grid that we provide a link to below.

So What's New? 

Acrobat 7 offers a bevy of new features.  Here are seven that strike us as particularly important: 

1. Improved Performance

A common beef with Acrobat 6 and earlier versions has been the excruciatingly long time it takes for Acrobat to open.  It's been our experience that Acrobat 7 opens far faster than prior versions -- an improvement that's sure to pay dividends several times each day.  Even the free Reader version of Acrobat 7 offers quicker launch times.

2. Enhanced Searching 

Version 7 offers a number of important improvements to Acrobat's searching features.  As with earlier versions, you can search within open PDF files or across PDFs residing in a folder on your computer or network.  In Acrobat 7, you can now search annotations, bookmarks, form fields, and more in addition to the actual text of documents themselves.  

If you haven't used the Search PDF sidebar that's available in Acrobat 6 and has been enhanced in Acrobat 7, you owe it to yourself to check out this powerful feature.  The sidebar can be displayed by clicking the Search option on Acrobat's Edit menu.  Want to locate every mention of a witness or term across a collection of PDFs?  The Search sidebar makes this task a cinch.  And when your search results in multiple hits, a Refine Results pane makes it easy to zero in on a more specific subset of documents by adding additional criteria.  The new searching capabilities are available in the free Reader, as well as the Standard and Professional versions of Acrobat 7.

Important caveat -- searching in Acrobat files is based on the premise that these files contain searchable text -- something that requires your discovery documents to be processed using Optical Character Recognition software in addition to being imaged.  You can use Acrobat itself to OCR documents one at a time (in Acrobat 7, there's a Recognize Text Using OCR option on the Document menu).  However, if you're dealing with a large number of documents, it's best to have OCRing accomplished when the documents are originally scanned.

3. The Organizer & Collections 

Acrobat 7 offers a new PDF management tool called the Organizer.  The Organizer makes it easy to scroll through previews of all PDF files viewed over the past year.  You can also use the Organizer to build Collections -- links to multiple PDF files anywhere on your hard drive or network.  PDFs can be opened, printed, merged, and emailed right from the Organizer.  The Organizer and its Collection feature provide a great new way to manage the PDFs of discovery documents produced for specific cases.  The free Reader version of Acrobat 7 does not offer the Organizer feature.

4. New Integration w/ Microsoft Outlook

Acrobat 7 makes it possible to automatically turn emails in Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express) into searchable PDF documents.  The resulting PDFs include attachments and are organized by sender, date, and subject.  This feature seems like it could be tremendously useful for dealing with Electronic Document Discovery.  Turn witness email files into searchable PDFs.  Pretty cool.  Since this feature involves the creation of new PDFs, it's not available in the free Reader. 

5. Many Views at One Time 

Acrobat 7 offers a New Window option that makes it easy to open multiple copies of a PDF and thus to have one document open to two or more locations at the same time.  You'll find this feature on Acrobat 7's Window menu.  The free Reader version of Acrobat 7 does not include the New Window feature. 

6. Enhanced Document Mark Up Capabilities

Acrobat 6 already offers tremendous document mark up capabilities such as annotations, highlighters, and sticky notes.  It also has header, footer, and watermark functionality.  These features, so critical for document review and exchange, have been enhanced in Acrobat 7.

A side note while discussing headers, footers, and watermarks:  it's common to Bates Stamp discovery documents.  There are a number of tools on the market that provide Bates Stamping functionality for PDFs.  One that receives favorable comments from CaseSoft clients is IntelliPDF Bates Stamp.  Please note that we have no connection with this product or the company that makes it.  Click to learn more about IntelliPDF Bates Stamp

7. Create PDFs that Can Be Marked Up Using the Free Reader

Users of free Adobe Reader 6 and earlier versions of the Reader were not able to annotate PDF documents in any way.  New features in Reader 7 allow Reader users to mark up PDFs if (and here's the catch) they were created using Acrobat 7 Professional Version, not the Standard version.  Stated another way: A PDF created using Acrobat 7 Professional turns on hidden features in no-charge Reader 7 that lets users employ annotations, highlighters, sticky notes, and other commenting tools.  If you want to collaborate with individuals who don't have full Acrobat licenses, this new option could easily justify the additional dollars required to purchase an Acrobat 7 Professional license or upgrade.

Other Acrobat Products

Now that we've reviewed the key new features in Acrobat 7, let's briefly review where two other Adobe tools, Acrobat Elements and Acrobat Capture, fit in the Acrobat product family.

Elements is a special version of Acrobat that Adobe sells to organizations that purchase 100 or more seats per order.  Like the Standard and Professional versions, Acrobat Elements can create PDFs.  However, Elements has the most limited set of additional features.

Click to view a comparison of the Standard, Professional, and Elements versions of Acrobat 7

Capture is a distinct Acrobat product that's designed to convert large volumes of paper documents to searchable Adobe PDFs.  Both Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional have built-in capability to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of image-only PDFs, but they aren't designed to process large numbers of documents.  That's where Capture comes in.  Consider purchasing Capture if you're planning to scan large volumes of documents in-house instead of having a service bureau do so on your behalf.  Click to view additional details about Capture.

The Verdict on Acrobat 7

Acrobat 7 is an impressive enhancement to an already indispensable tool.  Souped-up performance, improved searching, and the new Organizer feature more than justifies the cost of upgrading and should give anyone who has yet to purchase a full Acrobat license strong incentive to do so.

The only downside to Acrobat, including version 7, is that it isn't an appropriate choice for dealing with images of discovery documents in cases with 50,000 or more documents.  Matters with monster document collections demand specialized software tools such as Concordance or iConect, not Acrobat.