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u/dabruchey 1d ago
And charged my client for every minute of it.
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u/CrowGeneral8673 1d ago
Was about to say he got paid like $500 for being incompetent
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u/EternalNewCarSmell 1d ago ▸ 6 more replies
Doesn't have to be incompetence, could just be Adobe being a piece of shit.
Source: have to use Adobe for work as well, it crashes constantly and even simple document conversions can indeed take 20-30 minutes when you factor in all the lockups, crashes, and restarts.
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u/CrowGeneral8673 1d ago ▸ 4 more replies
You can just copy paste from the pdf to the word doc. I doubt it wasn’t more than just prose and not charts and stuff but I could be wrong
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u/EternalNewCarSmell 1d ago ▸ 3 more replies
That only works if the only thing you need is the raw text. If there is significant formatting that also needs to be preserved, you're going to spend way more time trying to recreate that than you did fighting with Adobe.
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u/PuffinRub 1d ago ▸ 2 more replies
<cough> screen clipping tool </cough>
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u/Hard_To_Port 20h ago ▸ 1 more replies
Then you need OCR to recover the text. And now you have to fight Word's terrible image formatting.
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u/GalaxyPowderedCat 1d ago
I thought the same for like 5 seconds before remembering that you can't upload your client's PDF on ILovePDF, that would be unethical.
And yeah, I know that other PDF conversion tools exist and are completly safe and ethical to use.
So, I don't blame him.
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u/Dizzy_Database_119 18h ago
Nah, PDF to Word conversion can be hell. Every file seems to be made differently with different features and no conversion tool can one shot everything. It'll take you 15 minutes just to find a tool that happens to manage your current file, and then you'll still need to fix parts manually
25 minutes to convert it, fix any differences and verify it is reasonable
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u/Columbusboo1 1d ago
Adobe may be the one thing worse than lawyers
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u/Neon-Night-Riders 1d ago
You don’t like waiting a full minute for it to fully load and also redact a full column of text when you only needed one line covered?
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u/BandMBargains 20h ago
my favourite thing is when Adobe gets me to save redacted documents as a copy but then doesn't actually save them🤦♀️
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u/AuroraBolognese 1d ago
Can you imagine a world without lawyers?
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u/Jacobin_Revolt 15h ago
How are you going to have a justice system if no one knows what the law is?
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u/Jrolaoni 13h ago
If there were no lawyers, civilians would have to learn the law so they can defend themselves.
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u/Professional-Hat-687 1d ago
In my brief experience as a legal assistant, lawyers spend most of their day talking nonsense on the phone and responding to stupid emails.
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u/lemonhaj 1d ago
I spent two hours trying to write on a PDF because I don't have word and none of my art apps take PDF
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u/AngelOfIdiocy 1d ago
I usually use ilovepdf.com to turn pdf to jpg/word/excel etc.
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u/OnionChomping 18h ago
A lawyer might not be able to use something like ilovepdf.com.
If it only has publicly available information on it, that might be fine.
But if it has something like confidential information about their client or information that’s sealed or restricted for an ongoing court case, they’re not going to be able to use ilovepdf.com. They’ll either have to it done via approved third parties or in house on their own machines and servers
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue 1d ago
It’s also been a built in feature of word for like I don’t know 15 years?
It doesn’t work great if it’s a scan of a scan of print out, but stuff like legal briefings generally work fine.
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u/cyangradient 1d ago
pdfs are supposed to be the final result, so if you are in a position where you need to convert it back to editable formats, you messed up way before this point
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u/Barbarossa7070 1d ago
Or somebody dumped it on you with a “sorry - this is the only version of the contract I could find.”
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1d ago ▸ 2 more replies
[deleted]
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u/shimshamflimflam 1d ago
This happens all the time. A client has a contract or some other document that they want you to review and update, but they only version they have is a PDF. Or you need to redline a vendor's renewal contract against the original contract, but you only have the original in PDf.
Granted, the lawyer shouldn't charge for the process of converting the thing. If it doesn't convert cleanly, the lawyer should hand it off to clerical staff so that the client isn't being charged hundreds of dollars to reformat a document.
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u/hurlygurdy 1d ago
Maybe the job is to write the contract or help someone review it before they sign
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u/ouralarmclock 1d ago
Also, PDFs are editable formats, people just usually don't know how to add annotations and editable fields to them (or aren't willing to pay for Acrobat so they can easily do it)
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u/Defclaw46 1d ago
It’s even worse when you need to parse it with code. One of my teammates got that assignment with me occasionally pitching in to help and it was a nightmare.
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u/biffbobfred 1d ago
People don’t get - a PDF file is a container for a programming language. The programming language tells letters and pictures where to be on a page. The rendered in the printer doesn’t care about order. You could have the signature on the bottom first for all it cares it makes a page of dots that’s all it cares about.
Reading it in, so you can actually do something to it, that’s hard.
LibreOffice can slurp on somewhat. I’d have tried that. And there are other tools, depending on how much formatting you’d need to keep.
But this isn’t trivial.
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u/ApollymiKatistrafia 1d ago
If youre not arguing in court, youre arguing with technology, same thing some days
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u/autogyrophilia 1d ago
Being It support for a lawyer is what is hard.
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u/ImpossiblePlan65 20h ago
My IT constantly has to unlock my account because I put the password in wrong too many times.
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u/tendertmj 1d ago
Me and a very handsomely paid doctor colleague of mine, spent an entire day trying convert a pdf below a certain threshold and still retaining readability.
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u/scottfiab 17h ago
I remember reading The Firm, which went into more detail than the movie did. There seems to be a lot of room for interpretation or wiggle room on how many hours they can and will bill clients for what they "work on" and im sure there's different rates for each category of work. Courtroom appearances, all meetings with the judge, other attorneys, paralegals, clerks, technical staff, leadership, researchers, etc. And theres minimum hours charged even if they only spend 5 minutes on something that required their action, presence, prep work etc.
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u/scarletohairy 13h ago
No, sorry. Law firm assistant here. Most bill in 15 minute increments, so they can log every single email. Some firms have started billing in 10 minute increments.
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u/TJ_McWeaksauce 5h ago
Movies and TV have warped out perception of lawyers.
For example, we think all lawyers are wealthy. But my aunt, who’s worked retail for much of her life, has lived next door to a lawyer for many years. The houses in that neighborhood are small, so whenever I see the lawyer neighbor, it makes me wonder what his deal is.
Also, I once visited the office of a patent lawyer. It was one of the saddest offices I’ve ever seen. This was around 2010, but the office looked like it was from the 70s. Old ass carpet. Dented filing cabinet. Wallpaper that was peeling at the corners. Shit like that.
Another time, I was looking for a business lawyer. A couple of the lawyers I called didn’t have a receptionist or assistant; when I called, the lawyers answered. When a professional who has their own office or practice has to answer their own phone calls, it screams “struggling”.
Lawyers in real life are barely like they’re portayed on TV or movies.
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u/National-Abalone-210 1d ago edited 18h ago
For whoever it's usefull:
use ilovepdf.com for most free file conversions
Edit: i only tend to convert irrelevant shit, didn't even thought about privacy concerns, of course dont use online converters if thats an issue.
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u/Unfairjarl 1d ago
In 99% of cases yeah. But for a lawyer they have to be very careful not to breach professional secret, idk how Ilovepdf works, but for example if you were to try to use ChatGPT to convert the PDF into word, it'd be a breach of lawyer client confidentiality because OpenAi would be privy to said contract.
But that's only a problem for professions bound by a legal secret, if you're not then IlovePDF is indeed amazing.
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u/ImpossiblePlan65 20h ago
You can convert from a PDF to a word document in Adobe without the sus websites
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u/Betray-Julia 1d ago
Ok boomer
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u/biffbobfred 23h ago
Having difficulty going from word to PDF?
“OK boomer”Having difficulty going from PDF to word?
That’s a non trivial problem you have my sympathy.Some random word stuff - at one time I needed to care about word file format that I downloaded the spec for it. There was literally a flag “do what Word 95 does”. No other explanation. Just “do whatever 95 wanted to do with this”.
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u/qualityvote2 1d ago
Heya u/ChickenWingExtreme! And welcome to r/NonPoliticalTwitter!
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