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The Board strongly encourages briefs and accompanying exhibits to be sequentially numbered, also known as Bates Numbering. Bates Numbering can either be done within the PDF itself starting at the first page of the document or it can be handwritten at the bottom right hand corner of the page.

Bates Numbering, also known as Bates Stamping, is an indexing method used for legal, business and medical documents (PDFs in most cases). Bates Numbers are perceived as digital reference points used to uniquely identify and label each page in a set of documents.

The Bates numbering machine helped organize and manage business paperwork. Office workers used it to stamp consecutive numbers or numbers in a repeated pattern onto pages of documents. The mechanism -- an improvement patented by Edwin G. Bates in 1891 -- automatically changed the number, making quick work for staff.

Bates numbers offer a way to specifically identify each individual page of a production. Bates numbering ? also known as Bates stamping or Bates labeling ? is the process of assigning a unique, sequential identification number to each page, file, or image in a voluminous production.

Bates numbering is a method of indexing legal documents for easy identification and retrieval. Each page of each document is assigned a unique Bates number that also indicates its relationship to other Bates-numbered documents. Bates numbers appear as headers or footers on the pages of each PDF in the batch.

Contents of native-format files cannot readily be Bates numbered. Similarly, files like Excel spreadsheets aren't necessarily formatted for or conducive to pagination.

While the original Bates stamps only used numbers (up to a maximum of 9999), there is no set format for Bates numbering. It may be purely numeric or alphanumeric. Either way, Bates numbering is essentially a paper-based method, most useful for printed productions or page-based images.