Conference October 2011 📍 Washington D.C., USA

PDF Days North America 2011 — Washington D.C.: PDF/A in Government and Legal Discovery

PDF Days North America 2011 convened in Washington D.C. in October 2011. Sessions examined the growing adoption of PDF/A in U.S. government agencies, the use of PDF in e-discovery (EDRM workflows), and early consideration of PDF/UA as an accessibility standard for federal document production.

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Key takeaways

PDF/A-2 was freshly published — U.S. federal practitioners assessed it cautiously, with most planning to continue PDF/A-1b for existing workflows.
E-discovery sessions established PDF production standards for litigation: native-format preference, load file metadata, and privilege redaction requirements.
Section 508 refresh planning began — PDF/UA was previewed as the coming technical standard for federal PDF accessibility.
Federal court CM/ECF requirements were driving practical PDF best practices: text-searchable output, bookmarks, metadata hygiene.
Approximately 160 attendees from federal agencies, law firms, legal technology vendors, and document management specialists.

PDF Days North America 2011 was held in Washington D.C. in October 2011 — four months after the publication of PDF/A-2 (ISO 19005-2) and a few months before ISO 14289-1 (PDF/UA) would complete its final ballot. The timing made it one of the first events where PDF/A-2's implications for U.S. government and enterprise could be discussed with the actual published standard in hand rather than draft text. Washington D.C. as a venue placed the event squarely in the federal document management ecosystem. NARA's evolving electronic records policies, the e-discovery requirements of federal litigation, the emerging Section 508 refresh discussions, and the legal document exchange needs of the large federal contracting community all shaped the sessions. Approximately 160 attendees came from across the government, legal, and document management sectors.

PDF/A-2 arrives: first assessments from the government sector

The sessions on PDF/A-2 at the 2011 North America event were the first opportunity for U.S. federal practitioners to work through what the new standard meant for their deployed PDF/A-1 workflows. The consensus was cautiously positive but measured: PDF/A-2 offered real benefits (transparency support, JPEG2000, optional content) but there was no urgent need to migrate existing PDF/A-1 archives. Federal archivists noted that their primary concern was long-term renderer availability — ensuring documents could be rendered accurately decades in the future. PDF/A's self-containment requirement (all fonts, colour profiles, and resources embedded) was more critical to them than the specific feature additions of PDF/A-2. For most existing workflows, PDF/A-1b remained the practical standard. The most forward-looking discussions concerned PDF/A-3 — then still in development — which would allow attaching any file type. Several presenters noted that NARA was exploring requirements for "sufficiently described digital objects" — a concept that PDF/A-3 with well-defined embedded attachments could partially address.

PDF in e-discovery: EDRM, load files, and the PDF production question

E-discovery — the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) for litigation — generates enormous volumes of PDF documents. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) framework was the industry standard for e-discovery workflows, and PDF's role within it was the subject of multiple sessions. Key questions addressed: - When should native documents be converted to PDF for production, versus produced in their native format? - How should a PDF production be structured for review platforms (at the time, tools like Concordance and Summation)? - What metadata must be preserved when producing PDFs in litigation? - How do PDF Portfolio structures interact with e-discovery family relationships (email + attachments)? The sessions drew on the redaction requirements of privilege review — a particularly sensitive area where PDF redaction failures could result in inadvertent privilege waiver or sanctions.

Section 508 and accessible federal PDFs

The U.S. Access Board was beginning work on its Section 508 refresh in 2011, which would eventually align Section 508 with WCAG 2.0. Sessions explored how the forthcoming PDF/UA standard would map to Section 508 obligations for federal agencies. A recurring theme was the scale problem: federal agencies publish millions of PDF documents annually. Retroactively making all of them PDF/UA compliant was not feasible. Sessions discussed prioritisation frameworks — which document types had the highest accessibility impact (forms, benefit notices, medical summaries) — and workflow approaches for ensuring new documents met accessibility standards from creation. The role of authoring tool settings was emphasised: a document created correctly in Microsoft Word with proper heading styles, table structure, and image alt text, and exported to PDF with accessibility settings enabled, would be substantially PDF/UA compliant without any post-export remediation. The accessibility audit guide captures the validation workflow that emerged from these discussions.

Legal document standards: court filings and the federal judiciary

U.S. federal courts use the CM/ECF (Case Management/Electronic Case Files) system for court filings. By 2011, all federal district courts required electronic filing in PDF format, and the requirements had evolved to include: text-searchable PDFs (not scanned images), maximum file sizes per document, and hyperlinked internal references for long documents. Sessions explored best practices for court-ready PDFs: proper bookmarking for documents over a threshold length (required by some local rules), page numbering consistency between the PDF display and the Bates/exhibit stamp numbers, and the use of PDF/A for exhibits that needed to remain permanently accessible in the court record. The issue of attorney metadata in court-filed PDFs was also discussed — the risk of inadvertently disclosing client communications or work product through document properties and revision history. This is covered in depth in the PDF metadata guide.

Frequently asked questions

What are the PDF requirements for U.S. federal court filings (CM/ECF)?

All U.S. federal courts require electronic filing via the CM/ECF system. PDF requirements vary by court but generally include: text-searchable PDF (not scanned images), documents under a specified file size (typically 50 MB per filing), fonts embedded, and hyperlinked document structure for documents over a certain page count. Some courts require PDF/A conformance for permanent record documents. Check the specific court's local rules and CM/ECF filing guides. The U.S. Courts website provides national standards; district courts may have additional requirements.

What is the EDRM and how does it relate to PDF in litigation?

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) is a framework describing the stages of e-discovery: identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, production, and presentation. PDF appears primarily in the production stage — documents are often converted to PDF for production to the requesting party. The EDRM's production standards include load file formats (OPT, DAT, CSV) that accompany the PDFs and carry metadata and family relationship data. Native format production (producing original DOCX, XLSX files) is increasingly preferred over PDF-conversion production for reducing processing cost and metadata loss.

How do I make a PDF text-searchable for court filing?

PDFs must be exported from text-based sources (Word, InDesign, LaTeX) with font embedding and without converting text to outlines. If you start from a scanned document, run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to add a text layer. Acrobat Pro's "Recognize Text" (OCR) function works well for individual documents. For batch OCR, tools including ABBYY FineReader, Tesseract (open-source), and Adobe's Acrobat batch processing can handle high volumes. After OCR, verify searchability by using Ctrl+F to search for known text in the document.

What metadata should I strip from a PDF before filing it in court?

Attorney work product metadata that should be removed before filing: Author field (may contain the typist's name, not the attorney of record), Subject and Comments fields (may contain internal case strategy notes), document revision history, and tracked changes if the PDF was converted from Word with revision marks. In Acrobat Pro, use Document > Examine Document to identify hidden data, then use Document > Sanitize Document to remove it. See the metadata guide for a comprehensive workflow.

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The PDF tools and standards discussed at this event are available free — no account needed.

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