You have a precedent decision and want a few paragraphs of its reasoning in your own filing. The file is a UDF; Word will not open it and you cannot copy from it. At this point most people retype from the screen. You do not have to — it transfers in two steps.
Why it does not work directly
UDF is UYAP's own document format and bears no relation to the formats Word recognises. Renaming the extension to «.doc» does not help either; that changes the name, not the structure inside the file.
The bridge is PDF. Convert the UDF to PDF and you have a widely supported document; from there, going to Word is a standard operation.
Which route to take
There are two routes and the choice is simple:
- If you only need the text: take the plain text (.txt) the UDF tool gives you and paste it into Word. This is the fastest route; formatting does not come, but the text does.
- If you need the formatting too: convert UDF to PDF, then PDF to Word. Paragraph layout, bold text and tables are preserved.
For quoting in a filing the first route is usually enough, since you will reformat the text to match your own document anyway. Choose the second when you need to carry over a table or a layout as it stands.
Step by step: transferring with formatting
- Convert the UDF to PDF: Drop the file into the UDF tool. The work happens in your browser; court documents are not uploaded.
- Download the PDF: Fonts, bold and underlined text, alignment and tables are preserved.
- Convert the PDF to Word: Feed the downloaded PDF to the PDF to Word tool and get an editable .docx.
- Check in Word: Review paragraph breaks and any tables after conversion. Small corrections in long documents are normal.
Scanned decisions need an extra step
In older case files a decision sometimes arrives not as a UDF but as a scanned image. In such a document the writing is really a picture; you can neither copy nor search it.
Then you first need to run the document through OCR to extract the text. OCR turns the writing in the image into real text; after that the same steps get you into Word.
Always compare afterwards
No conversion is flawless, and in a legal text a single shifted digit has serious consequences. After transferring into Word, compare these against the original:
- Case and decision numbers.
- Dates.
- Monetary amounts and interest rates.
- Statutory article numbers.
- The spelling of party names.
Keep the PDF of the decision as well. If you later need to show that your quotation is accurate, you have a readable copy of the source to hand.
A reminder: the PDF copy is not the signed original
The electronic signature in a UDF does not carry into the PDF. The converted file is a readable copy for working and quoting. If an official filing needs the document, use the signed UDF original.