Adobe has released version 8.0 of its popular software, Adobe Acrobat. This fully featured software boasts a number of new features that will be particularly attractive to attorneys, including redaction, show metadata, Bates numbering, improved forms functions, collaboration tools, and more. Other improvements include the ability to save a set of documents as a PDF binder, allowing each document in the binder to retain it's security values. You can also save email folders in MS Outlook or Lotus Notes to a PDF binder. There are more batch processes available, such as batch OCR. 

Brett Burney in Law.com writes about some of the new legal-specific features and David Masters has written a white paper entitled "Adobe Acrobat 8.0 for Legal Professionals" that provides a great overview of all the ways attorneys can benefit from this software. There are a number of free webinar-on-demand features on the Adobe site for lawyers, and don't forget to check out Rick Borstein's Acrobat blog, as well as Ernie Svenson and Dave Fishel's PDF for Lawyers blog for tips-n-tricks.

Most of the features that make this such a useful program for lawyers are to be found only in the professional version, as can be seen in this comparison chart of the Adobe programs. You can download a trial version of Acrobat 8.0 pro for 30 days to try it out.

Also, Acrobat Reader 8.0 is now available. This free product has also gone through some changes as well, with new features such as the typewriter tool for filling out non-fillable forms, saving form data, online collaboration, and new markup/review options.