PDF for law firms
Court e-filing has hard rules, and a rejected filing is a missed deadline.
What the courts actually require
Size is capped, and each court sets its own cap. Every federal district chooses its CM/ECF limit — the Central District of California allows 35 MB per PDF — while Illinois circuit courts and Michigan’s MiFILE take 25 MB per document.
Searchable text is the norm. California, Illinois and New York’s NYSCEF ask for text-searchable PDFs, and Texas asks that scans be made searchable with OCR.
Passwords are refused. Illinois, Texas, NYSCEF and Pennsylvania’s PACFile reject files with security or encryption.
Bookmarks are more and more often required. California’s Courts of Appeal want one for every heading and exhibit, and its superior courts want one for each electronic exhibit.
The cost of getting this wrong is not a re-upload. It is a missed deadline, and in litigation a missed deadline is often not recoverable. The court-by-court rules, each with its official source, are in our court e-filing PDF rules table.
The tools for it
- OCR PDFMake a scanned PDF searchable.
- Compress PDFMake a heavy file small enough to email, without wrecking it.
- Unlock PDFRemove a password from a file you already have the password for.
- Resize PDFChange the page size — A4, Letter, or a margin you set yourself.
- Bates numberingStamp sequential legal numbering across a whole set of files.
- Redact PDFActually remove sensitive parts — not just draw a box over them.
- Check a redactionFind out whether the words you blacked out can still be pulled out of the file.
- Split by bookmarksBreak a document into its own chapters — the split points are already in the file.
What this does not do
Merging your exhibits writes one bookmark per file, named after the file, and keeps each exhibit’s own bookmarks underneath it — name the files “Exhibit A …” before merging, or rename the entries afterwards in Edit Bookmarks. What we do not do is read your table of contents and build the tree from it.
We also do not check your filing against a specific court rule set. The tools handle each requirement individually; deciding which rules apply to your district is still your job.
In every case above, the document is processed without ever being transmitted. Nothing is uploaded, which for confidential filings, student records, unpublished manuscripts and salary data is not a convenience but the point.
Set it up for the whole team
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