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Honest assessment by solo practitioner who is more tech savvy than most
Updated January 04, 2022

Honest assessment by solo practitioner who is more tech savvy than most

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Power PDF Advanced

Overall Satisfaction with Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance)

I use Kofax Power PDF several times a day in my law practice. As a solo practitioner, efficiency is key. I use Kofax to convert paper documents I received for cases and projects to PDF format for storage office and cloud storage. I basically have a paperless office. Since all federal courts and several state courts require electronic filing of pleadings and other documents in civil litigation, I use Kofax to prepare such documents for filing. I frequently use the document conversion features to convert PDF spreadsheets and documents to Excel and Word formats. In litigation that generates significant amounts of documentary evidence, I use the search feature to analyze and locate important documents.
  • Search feature.
  • Conversion to Word and Excel formats.
  • Electronic and cloud-based document storage.
  • Paperless office.
  • Slow loading.
  • Slow loading of page and bookmark panels.
  • No keyboard shortcut modifications.
  • Saves substantial time in indexing and locating documents for retrieval.
  • Cloud storage allows access from remote locations.
  • Cost savings in terms of creating in-house exhibits.
Bottom line is it's cheaper than Adobe Acrobat, it's easy to use, it sufficient for my purposes as a solo law practitioner. However, if I was involved in a case involving tens of thousands of documents, I don't know whether it would be sufficient for the task. I just don't know because I've not had to use it in that context.
I've used Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader and Nitro PDF. For years I had both Nitro and Kofax. Now Kofax has all the features I was looking for (tabbed documents) so I canceled my Nitro subscription.
My main quibbles are that the software is rather slow loading. After opening a document, it takes a while for the sidebar panel features such as "bookmarks" and "pages" to populate. The lack of customization of keyboard shortcuts is a negative for me.

Do you think Tungsten Power PDF delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Tungsten Power PDF's feature set?

Yes

Did Tungsten Power PDF live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Tungsten Power PDF go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Tungsten Power PDF again?

Yes

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), RingCentral MVP, Nuance Dragon Speech Recognition
Tabbed documents. Document search. Bates stamping. Exhibit creation.
Well suited for creating a paperless office, document management and document analysis. Cost-effective alternative to Adobe Acrobat. In the law practice context, Power PDF Is satisfactory for preparation of PDFs for electronic filing, searching discovery documents, preparing trial exhibits, conversion features of PDF spreadsheets and text documents to Excel and Word formats.

Using Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance)

1 - I'm an attorney and have been practicing for nearly 38 years. While I've done a couple of tours of duty with large firms (150+ attorneys) I decided to go solo about 15 years ago. I'd always been fairly adept with technology and am always looking for ways to leverage technology to practice more efficiently without massive support staff.
1 - I'm basically my own support staff. There is very little support needed to keep power PDF up and running.
  • Preparing court filings
  • Preparing exhibit
  • archiving emails
  • Bates stamping discovery responses
  • creating exhibits for professional looking court filings.
  • Can't think of any
I've used Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Nitro Pro and Power PDF. Power PDF eventually added all the features I liked from the various other applications so I no longer use it any other PDF software.

Evaluating Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance) and Competitors

Yes - Nitro Pro
  • Product Features
I needed Bates stamping capability and individual tabbed documents.
I would not change it. I used Power Pro PDF side-by-side with Nitro Pro for several years.

Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance) Implementation

No insights to add. I used the nuance version of our PDF side-by-side with Nitro Pro for several years. Once Power PDF added features that had previously only existed on Nitro Pro, I have used our PDF exclusively.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - Not sure what you're asking for here. I'm the only person that uses the software so there was no change to manage aside from me learning to use the software.
  • none

Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance) Training

  • no training
Since the product was comparable to other PDF programs, if you are familiar with other programs such as Adobe Acrobat, you could get up to speed fairly quickly.

Configuring Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance)

This is my main complaint with the software. You cannot customize it via keyboard shortcuts.
no.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - Using options to change loading screen, fonts for notes, etc, scanner set up, included signatures, default page size and layout, integrations to Office 365 apps.
No - the product does not support adding custom code

Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance) Support

ProsCons
None
None
Did not purchase premium support. Regarding the previous list of questions, I've had few occasions to request support.
The only time I recall contacting support was to find out whether I was entitled to a discount to upgrade to a newer version of the product. I received a response in a timely fashion.

Using Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance)

ProsCons
None
None
  • Bates Stamping
  • Creating and affixing exhibit "stickers"
  • Searching documents produced in discovery
  • Can no longer email a document from the quick Access toolbar in Pro 4
Like any other piece of software, you eventually develop workarounds to create features that do not come with the software. again, the lack of keyboard shortcuts as an irritant which can be somewhat worked around by adding features to the Quick Access toolbar. I did note that in Power PDF Pro 4, you can no longer add an email document function to the Quick Access toolbar. Cannot imagine why this feature was removed.

Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance) Reliability

I am a sole practitioner so have no experience with this topic.
The software is resident on local computers, not cloud-based. I've never experienced anything I would consider to be an outage that can be solved by closing out and restarting the software.
My main complaint are the software is frequently slow and loading and and panel features often to go out to populate.

Integrating Kofax Power PDF (formerly Nuance)

It's all pretty straightforward in terms of picking features you want during set up.
  • MS Outook
  • MS Word
Don't know is meant by depth of integration. From what I can see, the depth of integration involves being able to convert emails into PDFs, convert Word documents to PDF's, convert PDFs to Word documents, etc.
None
don't understand the question