How to add links to PDF files in a court filing submitted on a flash drive

Courts frequently request that a copy of a court filing be submitted on a flash which contains hyperlinks to exhibits which are cited in the filing. If you don't want to add the url for where an exhibit was filed on PACER or on a state court docket, and you don't want to create one long, 100 MB plus PDF with internal links to each exhibit, it is possible to add links to PDFs of the exhibits which are on the same flash drive as the PDF of the main filing.

Obviously, anytime a flash drive is inserted in a different PC it can be assigned a different drive letter. Acrobat provides a way to add 'relative paths' which omit a full file path including a drive letter, and will simply point to the same location the open PDF is located in.

Follow these steps:

1. Put both the main document and the documents you are linking to in the same folder on the flash drive.

1. Click ‘Edit PDF’ from the toolbar:

 3. Select the option for ‘Add/Edit web or Document Link’

1. Choose the option for ‘Open a web page’, not ‘Open a file’

1. Just enter the filename of the document you are linking to – not the full filepath.  Remember each document you are linking to should be in the same folder as the court filing or whichever file has the links.

Now no matter where the files in the folder are copied to, Adobe Acrobat should open a relative path – it will open the linked files assuming that they are in the same folder as the PDF the links have been added to.

I tested this method by copying the files to more than one location on a network, and also with the data copied to a flash drive used with two different laptops, and then with the data copied off the drive and onto the hard drive of each laptop.  The links worked each time.

The only problem I encountered was when I tried to open the links using an open source PDF editor (for which I did not have a full license) instead of Acrobat.  However, the links did work when I simply opened the PDFs in Edge or Chrome, so if a recipient does not have Acrobat, they will still certainly be able to open a copy of the PDF with working hyperlinks.