Safeguard Bates Document For Free

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.

ESI evidence (which derives from the 1s and 0s of computer bits and bytes) does not require a Bates-stamp because it has something even better - a unique fingerprint. For every computer file, there is a 32-digit key that is unique to that file.

The short answer is no - legal professionals still use bates numbering - but documents and discoverable information have become overwhelmingly electronic. One thing to keep in mind is that native document productions usually can not include a physical bates stamp without first being imaged.

Bates Numbers typically have a prefix or suffix. For example, a paralegal might label the first page of Mr. Smith's case file with 0001/SMI. The first part of the series tracks the page number, while the second element remains constant and represents the client's last name.

How to add Bates Numbering to a PDF in Adobe Acrobat. Open the file. Click Tools. Select Edit PDF. Choose More. Click Bates Numbering and Add. Select Output Options to customize the serial numbers. Click OK.

Once you've scanned the documents it takes about 30 seconds to bates-stamp them using Acrobat 8.0. Using a computer to bates-stamp ensures that you don't miss any pages. And you can tell Acrobat to shrink the borders of the page and apply the bates-stamp in the resulting white area.

Bates numbering is a method of sequentially numbering pages with a reference identifier to make them easier to locate and reference. This could be as simple as sequential numbers like ?0001? and ?0002,? or it may include alphanumeric strings (such as ?ABC_0001? and ?ABC_0002?).