Does your attorney insist that pleadings be scanned in for e-filing rather than printed directly as PDFs, just so her real signature can appear, rather than “/s/”? We know that for e-filed documents, the attorney’s login ID and password are her signature for all legal purposes. We also know that creating PDFs by scanning is a bad idea because the resulting files come out bloated — possibly even exceeding your court’s 2MB file-size limit. And, because those scans are images rather than text, they’re not searchable, which might annoy tech-savvy judges and law clerks.

But there’s hope. There is a compromise that will enable your attorney to get her Joan Hancock onto a PDF that’s been created by printing directly to Acrobat. The Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog offers this tutorial on creating a transparent signature stamp. Hint: Read the intro, then skip down to the subheading, “An Easier Way: Good for most Legal Customers.”

Acrobat for Legal Professionals: Creating a Transparent Signature Stamp