Removing quotation marks in document properties window

I ran a batch process to convert MS Windows (2003) document to pdf. The properties set in the "author" field in the word document carried over to the pdf document, but added quotation marks around the content. For example, if the author content was John Smith and Company in the word document, the pdf document appeared "John Smith and Company". Is there any way to prevent that and/or remove the quotation marks via a batch process? I'd rather not open each pdf file and remove the quotation marks.

Thanks for any help.