Printing Sticky Notes On A PDF

More good stuff from the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog. This time on printing sticky notes on a pdf.

Sticky Notes are probably the most common method used to add notes and comments to PDF documents.

To add a Sticky Note, simply right-click anywhere on the page and choose Add Sticky Note. A sticky note will appear and you can add text to it easily.

Sticky notes can be minimized so that they don't cover up your document, or left open so you can see the text inside:

One frequent question I get is how to print pages with the contents of the sticky note showing.

In this article, you'll discover how to print a document with the sticky notes showing in Acrobat.

Set a Preference to Print Sticky Notes

Acrobat does not normally print sticky notes. You'll need to change a preference to enable printing of notes.

Choose Edit> Preferences and click on the Commenting category.

A) Choose the Segoe UI font matches print output better
B) Optional: Set Pop-up Opacity to 100%
C) Enable Print Notes and Comments
D) Disable pop-up scrolling (Makes it easier to position notes)

What is Pop-up Opacity? By default, Sticky Notes have a transparency of 85%. Viewed on screen or in print, the page beneath the sticky note will be visible. If you prefer on-screen and printed notes to have a solid white background, you can change it to 100%.

Positioning the Sticky Notes for Print

Acrobat does not provide a 1 to 1 correspondence between the appearance of sticky notes on-screen and your printed output.

I had best results with my document viewed at 75%.

You will need to spend some time positioning the Sticky Notes where you want them to print.

Printing the PDF with the Sticky Notes

To print the document, choose File>Print.

Before clicking the Print button, ensure that you are printing the PDF with the Document and Markups setting:

Acrobat will show you a preview of the page as it will print. Sometimes, the printed view of the note might not show all of the text in the note. If that is the case, you will see a small black symbol on the corner of the note in the preview window.

What does it look like when printed?

Here's an example below:

What about Adobe Reader?
Adobe Reader does not provide a way to print the contents of sticky notes. Sorry, you will need at least Acrobat Standard.

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Android Tablets On The Way

The success of Apple's iPad has been nothing short of breathtaking! For those in the know, the idea of a tablet/slate computer is nothing new. They have been around for years. Unfortunately, they have always been driven by sluggish, cumbersome, buggy Microsoft Windows operating systems. Then along comes Apple and you get a tablet computer the way it was originally envisioned: thin, light, handy, and efficient. With the success of the iPad, the next best thing in operating systems -- the Android OS -- is catching the tablet wave. From Larry Dignan and ZDNet.com comes an update on Android and the tablet revolution.

The Android tablets are coming and this time Apple won’t have a big head start. Will value tablets sell?

Dell’s Streak (top right), a 5-inch tablet powered by Android, launched Tuesday in the U.K. and the device will come to the U.S. later in the summer. The Streak has integration with the Android market and a few other goodies that may attract buyers, according to Dell.

Meanwhile, Pandigital has its Novel, another Android-powered device. The Novel (bottom right) is a 7-inch touchscreen device also powered by Android. Joel Evans calls the Novel a poor man’s iPad at $199.

Get used to it. There’s an army of “poor man’s iPads” on deck. Note these devices won’t be iPad killers or anything, but Apple legitimized the tablet form factor and the followers are lining up. There will be multiple Android tablets waiting in the wings.

Last year’s netbook is this year’s tablet. Om Malik notes that Android has trumped Google’s Chrome OS. Jason Hiner wonders if Android is the Windows of smartphones. One thing is clear: Android has proven to adapt to multiple devices. And like Google’s smartphone efforts, the aim appears to be to surround Apple.

The big difference with the Android tablet army is that the Apple iPad doesn’t have much of a head start. Apple’s iPhone had a few years on the first Android device. Google’s Android platform is growing quickly, but isn’t likely to catch the iPhone in terms of smartphone market share any time soon. Google’s Android will be a solid No. 3 in smartphones.

However, tablets are a different story. Apple’s iPad isn’t as expensive as originally thought, but it’s not going to be $199 any time soon. Android tablets will hit that price point. Just to reiterate: None of these Android devices are going to matter to Apple, which doesn’t sweat market share standings.

The big question is how long it takes an Android tablet equivalent to the HTC Droid Incredible to form. The Incredible is a solid iPhone rival, but Apple had a few years to establish the its smartphone before real rivals surfaced. The iPad is a big success, but will only have a head start of a quarter or two before Android tablets appear everywhere.

Can Android tablets reach feature parity on the iPad while squeezing Apple on price?

Please click here for the original article.

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Thoughts on Mining for Referrals

Referrals should, could, are the life blood of a successful family law practice. From her Legal Ease Blog Allison Shields offers sage advice on how to go about getting referrals from your existing client base.

Are you building relationships or 'mining' for business?

A lawyer recently sought advice from a group of peers on a list-serve about marketing his practice and mining his current and former clients for business. While there is nothing wrong with the concept of trying to build your practice through referrals from current and former clients (in fact, I encourage it), lawyers need to be careful about the way they approach these business development efforts.

There has been an increasing shift towards viewing a law practice as a business with economic realities that must be faced and one of the biggest economic realities for any law practice (and indeed, any business) is that without clients, the practice does not exist. The most important person in any law practice is the client. But, as Duncan Manley, a lawyer whom I like and respect, recently wrote in the Primerus Paradigm magazine (I've written about the Primerus organization before, here and here) for law firms especially, marketing is all about building relationships.

In order to gain the confidence of your existing clients, to develop a loyal client base who will refer business to you over time, Manley reminds us that the clients needs to "know that you are a good lawyer,...have confidence in your ability,...trust you and know that you are genuinely concerned about them and their company." But this knowledge and trust, almost by definition, must be built over time. It is never built by focusing primarily on yourself, your firm, your knowledge, expertise, legal skill, etc.

My advice to the lawyer I referenced at the beginning of this post was to focus more on building relationships with existing and former clients (and other professionals and strategic partners as well), rather than focusing on your own desire to make connections or to build your practice.

You need to be careful about making clients, former clients and strategic alliances feel that you’re completely in this for you, or that you’re browbeating them or making them feel guilty about not referring you to others. If people feel even the smallest bit turned off, if they feel that someone is attempting to control them, use them for their connections or make them feel guilty, there’s going to be a backlash – even, and maybe especially if they do refer someone else to you in the short run.

The approach, “Have you recommended me to someone in the industry? Why not?” is all about you and your business, not about the client and their business, or the client as a person, colleague or friend. Newsletters, personal letters and gifts are nice, but it’s the long term relationship and genuine caring about clients and their businesses that is going to drive referrals to your door.

You certainly want to make sure that all of your clients and former clients know what you do, what you can do (if it is different than what you did for them), and who you’d like to do it for. It also doesn’t hurt sometimes to ask them to make a specific connection for you or to suggest that you’d love to work with others like them, or ask if they know anyone who might benefit from your services. But you need to do it at the right time and in the right way.

Rather than focusing on what connections your clients and former clients can make for you, think about what connections you can make for them. Show an interest in them as people, both inside and outside of business. Keep your eyes and ears open for ways to help them grow and prosper - even if they're completely unrelated to your practice, or even to the law.

If you come at this from the perspective of giving to your clients, helping them grow and succeed and developing relationships with them, rather than just trying to use them or squeeze additional business or referrals out of them, you’re more likely to meet with success.

Take a page from Duncan Manley's playbook. He says,

I like people, clients or not, and I like lawyers. I like to talk to them. I like to find out about what they do, who they know, where they live and whether they like to fly fish, jog or ride horses....One time I had a client who told me I asked more questions than anyone he had ever known....I am guilty, but that is the only way to find out about people, and they know I wouldn't be asking those questions if I wasn't interested in them. I think we all want to be liked by others.

People respond to your genuine interest in and care and concern for them. When they like you and feel that you like them, the business will follow - even when you don't expect it.
Please click here for the original article.

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JD Supra

JD Supra is a site that is getting more of my attention lately. It lets you create an impressive online portfolio of your articles, newsletters, alerts, court filings, and presentations in minutes. Then, it helps you get noticed (by prospective clients, colleagues and the media), so you can concentrate on doing what you do best – great work!

On his Legal Practice Pro blog Jay Fleischman give us a nice JD Supra overview.

Online legal marketing involves content creation andcontent distribution; doing so enables us to showcase our knowledge and establish trust with our prospective clients.

One of the best content distribution sites for lawyers is JDSupra, run by a team of awesome and smart people who want nothing more than to give you the widest possible exposure for your content. JDSupra is not only highly-trafficked and well-indexed, but the service provides a number of feature-rich Facebook pages and widgets to pump content out far more effectively than would otherwise be possible.

In the interests of full disclosure, I had the chance to meet with the JDSupra team while in California last month for the annual National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys convention. Aviva Cuyler bought me a turkey sandwich and a Diet Coke while I was hanging around with Adrian Lurssen (I think she was worried I’d pass out from hunger because I’d been talking with Adrian for so long). That might be something warranting FTC disclosure, though I did offer to pay her for lunch.

In fact, this graph from compete.com shows that JDSupra has grown by 226% in the past 12 months alone. Pretty impressive, no?

JDSupra Traffic Graphic" height="160" width="300">

But using JDSupra as a distribution mechanism is still new to lots of lawyers, so I thought I’d share how I use it as part of my online legal marketing efforts.

4 steps, that’s all it takes. Ready? OK, here we go (and by the way – if you click the pictures they will open up full-size so you don’t have to squint):

Step One: Choose “Post A Document”

JDSupra Tutorial 1" height="219" width="300">

Step Two: Choose “Legal Article/Newsletter,” upload the PDF document, add the title of the document (which should be the title of the blog post), and add the “Document Date” (which will be the date on which you are uploading the content.

JDSupra Tutorial 2" height="219" width="300">

Step Three: Scroll down and choose your category. My stuff is usually related to either bankruptcy or legal marketing, so those are my go-to categories. Then, for document summary, enter the first 1,000 characters of the content.

JDSupra Tutorial 3" height="219" width="300">

Step Four: Click “Continue,” then “Submit.” (or “Submit & Post Another Doc” as the case may be).

JDSupra Tutorial 4" height="219" width="300">

That entire process should take you about 3 minutes. Greater distribution for your content marketing, better results from your online legal marketing efforts, and the basic level of service is entirely free.

So are you using JDSupra?

Please click here for the original article.

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Name recognition is critical to your marketing

Name recognition is critical to marketing. Your name is your brand. It is your reputation. It is one of your commodities. At his Rainmaker Lawyer blog Dave Lorenzo posts a great article on name recognition.

Who is the best lawyer in town in your practice area?

The answer depends on education, experience and positioning. Two out of three of these attributes are easily accepted. Education is important because it shows that you have the discipline and the desire to truly understand the principles behind the action. Experience is important because it helps you put things into proper perspective. But most people are perplexed when I tell them that positioning is a determining factor in their career success.

Positioning means creating an identity in the minds of the people in your target market. It is THE MOST IMPORTANT factor in determining how successful you will be as a lawyer. You can be the greatest lawyer on the planet but if you are positioned wrong, you will not be able to attract quality clients or command high fees. It is up to you to influence the perception your future clients have of you. Here are three ways to position yourself as an expert.

Focus on a Targeted Niche

If you want to be perceived as an expert you must become known as an authority in at least one focused niche. There is no better way to tilt the landscape in your favor than to drill deeply into one area of the law and claim it as your own.

I am not talking about practicing law only in one specific area. I am talking about marketing your law firm to a focused group of clients for a specific application of the law. Want some examples?

• Focusing on immigration law is not enough. Focusing on immigration law related to individuals with extraordinary ability is much better.
• Focusing on intellectual property law is not enough. Focusing on managed service agreements is better.
• Focusing on criminal defense law is not enough. Focusing on defense of computer related crimes is better.

You can still accept clients outside of those areas of focus. But your marketing should be exclusively dedicated to your niche market.

Demand Appropriate Compensation

Experts get paid better than generalists. Experts command high fees. Experts can basically charge whatever they want.

My practice is the perfect example of this principle. I focus my marketing efforts exclusively on attracting lawyers. I make recommendations and the clients who implement them achieve outstanding results. In the past year, one of my clients went from start-up to over $370,000 in billing. Do you think he blinked at writing a check for his investment in my services? Three people in my Strategic Advisory Groups have doubled their billing compared to last year (in less than five months). Do you think they mind making the required investment to be in that program?

If your clients want to work with the best, they have to pay for that privilege. Your marketing establishes you as an expert. You can then command expert-level compensation.

Educate Your Prospective Clients

Educational marketing is the most valuable form of promotion. Teaching is leading and everyone wants to work with a leader. Help your clients understand how complex the law can be. Give them a peek behind the curtain at what you do. Let them see that the average lawyer is mystified and baffled when he is confronted with the things you face each and every day.

There is an old parable that says:

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I have an addition to that. My addition is:

“Teach a man to fish and he will return to learn how to cook.”

The position you occupy in the minds of your clients and prospective clients is entirely up to you. You can take control of it or you can throw yourself on the mercy of the market. You future is too important to leave in the hands of someone else. Take control of it today.

Please click here for Dave's original article.

visit hardinglaw.com for more information of Harding & Associates Family Law

facebook is dead. Long live facebook.

facebook continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. The passion by which people engage on the social networking site is rabid. Marketing books are proliferating with the mantra that businesses must facebook or die. Is there truth in that advice? No, according to Dan Schwabel. Dan publishes the Personal Branding Blog. He recently lit up the blogosphere by knocking both twitter and facebook! Of course a jihad of twitface dearth rained down upon him. I think a lot of what he wrote is right on! Here is what he has to say.

Last Monday, I wrote about how Twitter isn’t a marketing platform anymore and suddenly the web was buzzing. I’ve been blogging since 2006 and I’ve never seen this strong of reaction on my own blog. There were over one hundred comments, seven hundred retweets, and two hundred shares on Facebook. I’ve never felt very controversial, so I didn’t push that post in order to get attention, but now since I have your attention, today I’m going to tackle Facebook as a marketing platform.

Note: What I failed to mention in my last post is that these posts aren’t geared to mega brands (i.e. Lady Gaga or Coca Cola). They’re for the average professional, whose trying to grow their business by using social media tools.

Facebook used to be an amazing marketing platform when the news feed was the only feed available to users. I remember updating my status and receiving a lot of comments from people I’ve met or interacted with all throughout my life. But just like Tivo and Caller ID, Facebook created it’s only filtering system, dividing your status updates into two streams: Top News and Most Recent. Although these names have changed over the past year, their purposes have remained consistent with the Facebook platform. The Most Recent feed consists of content from all of your Facebook friends, while the Top News feed is more selective based on an algorithm. When you login to Facebook in the morning, the default feed is Top News. Most of your content will never even be seen by your friends on Facebook, and we’ve also been enabled to “hide” updates from select friends, which is similar to “unfollow” on Twitter.

My thesis is that Facebook is no longer a suitable marketing platform for your business if you’re looking to convert “friends” into money. Just like Twitter, your message is not viewed by as many people as you’d think, and although the commitment to being a Facebook friend is greater than a Twitter follower, it’s still not strong enough of a bond to yield monetary value.

Facebook is no longer a viable marketing platform.

I’m saying this as a heavy user of Facebook since my University was the 16th school to be signed up back in 2005. I have a maxed out Facebook profile, have a Facebook page for Personal Branding, for Personal Branding Magazine, for Me 2.0, for the Student Branding Blog, and I just launched a page for myself.

The logic

There is a reason why the value of a Facebook friend is $3.50 versus the value of an email contact, which is $948. I guarantee that most of your Facebook friends are either not your friends or haven’t spoken to you in at least two years. Now, I do like Facebook because it allows you to fulfill the “reconnect” rule of relationship building that I’ve discussed previously on the blog. When I say “marketing platform,” I mean that your friends/list become potential buyers, affiliates, partners, etc.

The News Feed algorithm has made it very challenging for marketers. Here is what distinguishes posts that appear in the “Top News” section of your feed:

The News Feed algorithm bases this on a few factors: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update). (source: Facebook.com)

Remember that this algorithm is the same for profiles and pages.

What happens to your status updates?

1. You update your Facebook status.
2. Depending on your previous status updates, the number of comments that you’ve received, which of your friends commented, and if the content is a video or is in standard text, it will be viewed by those users in their Top Stories feed. Otherwise it will be in “Most Recent” with all of the other clutter, which in some cases could be hundreds of updates depending on the amount of friends they have.
3. If one friend comments on your status update, that comment goes into their friends’ “Most Recent” feed unless their friends also commented on the same story. This is not the viral effect that you would think because there is generally a lack of visibility with a second degree contact.
4. If no one else sees the status update, then it’s out of sight and out of mind.

Like Twitter, as Facebook users acquire more and more friends, and “like” pages (which is occurring at an exponential rate), your message get’s lost. Over 100,000 websites have integrated the Facebook “like” button, which has encourages more “liking” and as a result, more clutter!

Key point: It’s not about how many friends and fans you have on Facebook, but rather how much they evangelize your page and use it as a destination.

The facts

As Facebook acquires more users, and your network grows, it will always be harder to make your updates appear in the Top News section. If your updates don’t get into that section, they will get lost. Most Facebook users don’t evangelize product or band pages, so you really won’t get as much mileage on them anyways. This is the reason why most pages don’t have a lot of “fans,” and why Facebook launched the “like” button to encourage friending!

• ~500 million registered users (AllFacebook.com)
• 59% of US Facebook Users DON’T Promote Product Fan Pages (AllFacebook.com)
• 60% of People DON’T “Friend” Brands on Facebook (ReadWriteWeb.com)
• 175 Million Users Per Day Log Into Facebook (MarketingPilgrim.com)
• 77 % of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans (TechCrunch.com)

You can’t trust Facebook

In a previous post, I gave you some reason why you can’t trust social networks. I was very serious when I wrote that piece. There is no free lunch. We’ve traded our data for the right to use Facebook, which is a non-monetary cost that we still incur. Yesterday, I read a very critical, and short, post by Robert Scoble that linked to this post by Leo Laporte:

Leo Laporte: “Texas radio station, KNOI Real Talk 99.7 was banned from Facebook for talking about privacy issues and linking to my show and Diaspora. http://knoifm.com/news/1569-facebookdisablesknoi.html” (Robert Scoble’s blog)

As you can see, if you invest in Facebook as a marketing platform, all of your hard work might be wasted one day when they shut your page down.

The real applications

Instead of using Facebook as a marketing platform, try these applications:

• Customer support: Answer user questions by responding to updates on your page’s wall, and then check back to see if they’ve continued the conversation. This is one of the main benefits of Facebook because conversations are grouped together.
• Brand awareness: 50% of Facebook users login every day, which means that your brand can be viewed by a lot of users each day, and if people support you, your brand can travel far without advertising.
• Job searching: Facebook has it’s own marketplace, unlike Twitter, where you can view current job openings in your network. Sadly, not enough people use this feature though.
• Networking: If you’re looking to connect with your audience, there’s a safe bet that they’re on Facebook.
• Creating buzz: A lot of brands have succeeded in capturing a lot of followers due to holding contests on their Facebook page. “If you like this page, you’ll receive a pizza.”
• Recruitment: Facebook’s massive global talent pool makes it attractive for recruiters, and Facebook is already being used for candidate background checks.
• Researching: You can learn a lot about your target market through reviewing employee updates and if you’re in sales, it can help you connect to the decision maker.
• Philanthropy: If you want to partner with a charity and raise money, then Facebook fan pages can support your efforts.

As you can see, Facebook isn’t a great marketing platform. I’m not sure why advertisers are promoting their Facebook and Twitter pages instead of their websites. It would be much wiser to invest in a blog as a landing page instead of using a platform, that you can’t trust, and that doesn’t yield monetary results. Recently, Facebook tried to take down the custom tab feature from pages without asking page administrators first. They reverted back once they received a backlash, but the point is that you don’t know what they are going to pull in the future. It’s better to invest in your website than someone else’s!

Your turn

Have you been using Facebook as a marketing platform? What results have you gotten?

Please click here to view Dan's original post.

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information of Harding & Associates Family Law

Skype Is Great Stuff!

Skype is becoming one of my favorite software programs. Making and receiving phone calls around the world, instant messaging, video calls, and more, and more. I am not alone in my Skype love. Colleague, tech and law firm guru, practice management hero Lee Rosen also loves Skype. Because his words are always better than mine, I will share with you what Lee has to say in praise of Skype:

Skype is my most used software package. I use it, literally, all day long. It’s pretty amazing when you really put it to use.

I use Skype, primarily, as my instant messenger client. Everyone in my firm, in all three offices, runs Skype all day and we communicate with instant messages constantly. I use it when I want someone to call me. I send a quick message that says “call me now” or “call me when you get a chance.”

We use it when someone arrives at the office for a meeting to let the attorney or paralegal know their visitor has arrived. We use it to arrange for front desk coverage when the receptionist needs to go to the bathroom. We alert attorneys that a caller is holding when the attorney is on another call. Skype works well between offices and within a single office. It’s also terrific when someone is working from home. Of course, you can send messages while already on a call so you don’t need to deal with a noisy intercom or putting a caller on hold.

That’s just the beginning of what Skype can do. In addition to its messenger capabilities you can also make video calls. Everyone in our office has a webcam and we can communicate, between offices or home/office, with video. I also video chat with my friends, family and some clients who have Skype set up. The quality is fantastic and the calls are free.

Skype just added, yesterday, video conference calling. It’s in beta and it’s only available to PC users (not Macs) for now. It’s free, but they plan to charge late this year for the feature. We started testing it yesterday with excellent results. Skype, of course, also has built-in audio conferencing. The audio conferencing has a feature that highlights the name of the participant that’s talking so you don’t need people to identify themselves when they speak. You can seek their name blinking on the screen as they talk. Skype to Skype audio conferencing is free.

Skype also provides the capability to send SMS text messages from your desktop. This isn’t a free feature. It costs a few cents per text and you can leave funds in your account and pay as you go. There isn’t a monthly minimum.

Finally, of course, you can use Skype to make phone calls. They charge for calls to landlines. It runs two cents per minute in the U.S. or you can sign up for an unlimited plan for $3.00 per month. My mother called me earlier this week from Marrakech on my home phone. That cost her two cents a minute. Skype is almost always the best deal for calling people around the world.

Skype can give you a phone number so non-Skype users can call you on your Skype account. They also offer voicemail and you can forward calls from your Skype number to your cell phone or landline. They offer a free Skype to Go option so you can dial in from any phone and make international calls at Skype rates.

I’ve got Skype with me even when I’m away from my computer. I have Skype on my iPhone and iPad and I use IM+ on both of those devices so I can keep getting instant messages when I’m mobile.

To really use all the goodness of Skype you need a webcam and a headset with a microphone. You can download Skype for free and give it a try. What have you got to lose?

Please click here for Lee's original article on DivorceDiscourse.com.

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information of Harding & Associates Family Law