Splitting, Merging and Unitization

You have received one 1,000 page PDF that includes over one hundred documents.  Or you have received 5,000 pages of medical records, saved as one page PDFs.  What should be done to right-size the PDFs?  How should the documents be segmented to be most useful for attorney and litigation team review?

Litigation support professionals refer to this issue as "document unitization" or the setting of document boundaries, and it involves determining where one document ends and the next document begins.  Another closely entwined issue relates to document attachments: should attachments be part of the same or a different document?  If an attachment will be treated as a different document, how will the document and attachments be related as part of a retrieval system?

We offer these tips:

Merge PDFs with Adobe Acrobat.  Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional are the pay versions of the ubiquitous free Adobe Acrobat reader.  If using Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Professional, you have the tools needed to split and merge PDFs, even if they may be hard to discern in Acrobat's sometimes elusive user interface.

To merge PDF files, select "Create PDFs from multiple files," and then select the files to be merged and their order. Acrobat then saves the files into a new PDF.

Splitting PDFs with Adobe Acrobat.  Acrobat Standard and Professional offer a couple of ways to split PDF files.  To separate a PDF into single pages:  go to the Document>Extract Pages menu.  Specific individual pages can then be re-combined into new PDFs.   Alternatively, a PDF with selected pages can be created with the Acrobat print driver.  To make a PDF this way, open up the PDF to be split, and select File>Print.  On the print menu box, select the pages of the smaller PDF to create.  For example, to print pp. 1-32 of a 100 page PDF, create a smaller PDF, effectively splitting it.

Split PDFs Using Free PDF Print Drivers.  There are a number of free PDF print drivers available.  With these programs PDFs can be effectively split as part of the printing process, as described with Adobe Acrobat above.  

Split and Merge PDFs with third party Specialty Utilities.  The file splitting procedures above using Adobe Acrobat or third-party print drivers are cumbersome and inefficient.  To fill the void there are numerous PDF splitting and merging utilities that make this easier.  Features include splitting and merging by multiple page ranges, updating of bookmarks, and batch operations.

Think Through Document Unitization Ahead of Time.  It is much easier to create documents with the proper document breaks, than to separate or merge them later.  The person scanning documents should be given instructions as to proper document separation.  Many scanning systems accept a blank page or a bar-coded page as a document break indicator that automatically creates a new PDF file.  Often, document break determinations depend upon the specific review needs and may vary from case to case.

Consider How Attachments Will be Handled.  One tricky area of document unitization involves attachments to documents.  Should attachments be part of the main document or a separate document?  If attachments are saved as separate documents they should in some manner be associated with the main document.    One way to do this is with file names, such as the following:

This allows the documents and attachments to be dealt with as separate documents, but then associated through the file names.