The Bates stamp or Bates numbering has been around for a long time: Edwin G. Bates patented his device for attaching consecutive digital stamps to documents in 1892. In the past, Bates stamp documents required a person to literally stamp every page of the entire document to be produced. (The value of Mr. Bates` patent was that the number was incremented with each stamp, saving the clerk the chore of manually increasing the number between each page.) Parties to a dispute would label Bates on the documents they submitted at the time of discovery so that they could easily refer to documents during the proceedings as statements – for example, «Witness, please refer to document number DEF-006201 in the lower right corner. Have you ever seen this document? What is it? Without the Bates stamp, it would be extremely confusing to ensure that the witness was talking about the document that the lawyer claims to have seen at the time. It can also be difficult for those reading the transcripts to participate. Confusion over such issues can be very problematic – «No, Your Honour, I was not referring to the Treaty when I said I had signed the document, I was referring to…» There are several age-old practices in the legal profession whose purpose is somewhat difficult to understand. Take, for example, the practice of beginning movements with the words «COME NOW.» The only value to start with these words is that the author of the briefing does not have to work on a good first sentence. In nine out of 10 cases, the briefing would be better with a first sentence that «sells the sizzle» by engaging the reader from the first words. (See Ross Guberman, Point Made: How to Write Like The Nation`s Top Advocates.) Bates numbers (Bates stamps, Bates labels) are numbers used to uniquely identify the pages of a set of documents. Bates numbers are used in almost all law firms as a method agreed upon by the parties to ensure a common naming convention when referring to specific pages.

Bates numbering (also known as Bates stamping, Bates branding, Bates encoding, or Bates markup) is a method of sequential numbering of pages with a reference number. A manually operated Bates numbering device is used to «stamp» a number on one side, and the numbers will advance automatically after each stamp. Bates numbering is used in the fields of law, medicine and economics to place one or more identification numbers, date and time markers on images and documents during their scanning or processing, for example during the discovery phase of process preparations or the identification of business receipts. Bates stamps can be used to mark and identify copyrighted images by affixing a company name, logo, and/or legal copyright. This process ensures automatic identification, protection, and sequential numbering of pages. Bates numbering is a feature that lawyers welcome. Finally, it is mainly used in the field of law. Needless to say, legal documents can contain thousands of pages, and indexing those pages with Bates numbers makes it easy to retrieve information from them. 14th century, in the transitive sense 1 A Bates number is used to identify each page of a document used in legal proceedings. Parties stamp every page of every document used in litigation and in many other types of legal matters, including transactional matters, to ensure that all parties and the court can refer to the same page. The term is a historical use of the original automatic page numbering device, invented by Edwin G. Bates in the early 1900s, but printed electronically in modern times.

Sometimes the numbering of pages in a legal document is now called «Bates numbering» or «Bates stamp» or more often «page marking». Bates numbers are usually a combination of alphanumeric characters with a scheme that means something relevant to the parties. Able2Extract has a good handful of features for lawyers, with Bates numbering being the most important. Learn how to apply Bates numbers to your legal PDF documents and make the most of this feature. eDiscovery software includes imaging capabilities, which convert a document from its native format to PDF or TIFF image. Imaging is also known as printing or conversion. By applying sequential numbering to PDF documents, you make it much easier to organize and identify important documents. For example, a paralegal can instantly search for the document and find the page containing the information a lawyer should refer to when making a statement. The short answer is no – lawyers still use Bates numbering – but the documents and information that can be found have become mostly electronic.

One thing to note is that native document productions generally cannot include a physical Bates stamp without being mapped first. Native productions are becoming more common, and eDiscovery software tools need to use a lightweight workaround to ensure that Bates numbering makes sense. Typically, all native documents have a page number of 1, and the file occupies only one Bates number. Bates numbering, also known as Bates stamping, is an indexing method used for legal, business, and medical documents (in most cases, PDFs). Bates numbers are seen as digital reference points used to uniquely identify and label each page of a set of documents. The process, known as Bates numbering, has long been the standard in the legal industry for referencing documents and pages. In the 1890s, Edwin G. Bates patented the Bates auto-dialing machine. While Bates may not have invented the idea of consecutive page numbers, he was able to make Bates` physical numbering process much more efficient with his tool. This sequential dial stamp was used to manually mark each page and automatically move to the next number. The tool would start at the beginning number 0 and continue until 999. Today, I can say with great certainty that discovery projects are much more likely to exceed 1000 pages.

For more information on this story, a series of company documents on the Bates Manufacturing Company was archived via the Thomas Edison Papers, which are now held at Rutgers University. Able2Extract has a good handful of features for lawyers, with Bates numbering being the most important. Here`s how to apply Bates numbers to your legal PDF documents and get the most out of the feature. Bates numbering (also known as Bates stamping) is used in the legal industry as a method of marking and identifying legal documents to facilitate identification and retrieval. Almost all U.S. law firms use Bates numbering during the discovery phase of a dispute, where a large number of documents need to be referenced and shared. Bates numbering, named after the Bates auto-numbering engine, assigns a unique identifier to each page. This identification can be purely numeric or contain a combination of letters and numbers (alphanumeric). There is no standard method for numbering documents, nor is there a default font for these numbers.

Bates numbering, also known as Bates stamping, is an indexing method used for legal, business, and medical documents (in most cases, PDFs). Bates numbers are seen as numerical reference points used to uniquely identify and label each page of a set of documents. Bates numbering is a feature that lawyers welcome. Finally, it is mainly used in the field of law. Needless to say, legal documents can contain thousands of pages, and indexing those pages with Bates numbers makes it easy to retrieve information from them. By applying sequential numbering to PDF documents, you make it much easier to organize and identify important documents. For example, a paralegal can immediately search for the document and find the page that contains information that a lawyer should refer to when testifying. It goes without saying that this is a huge saving of time and money. Bates numbering (also known as Bates stamping, Bates branding, Bates encoding, or Bates markup) is a method of sequential numbering of pages with a reference number. A manually operated Bates numbering device is used to «stamp» a number on one side, and numbers are automatically preferred after each stamp.

Bates numbering is used in the legal, medical and commercial fields to place one or more identification numbers, date and time markers on images and documents during their scanning or processing, for example during the discovery phase of process preparation or identification of business documents. Bates stamps can be used to mark and identify copyrighted images by affixing a company name, logo, and/or legal copyright. This process ensures automatic identification, protection, and sequential numbering of pages. Bates numbering is often used as an organizational method of identifying and identifying legal documents. Almost all U.S. law firms use Bates stamps, although the use of manual stamping is becoming increasingly rare due to the rise of electronic numbering – primarily in Portable Document Format (PDF) files rather than printed documents. During the investigation phase of a dispute, many documents may require the use of unique identifiers for each page of each document for reference and retrieval. Digital WarRoom offers superior features and functionality to ensure you are prepared for the entire Bates punching and production process. Register here for a demo of Digital WarRoom. We have other support resources to ensure your efficient management of the document creation process. This includes our resource blog and user guide. Contact us at info@digitalwarroom to find out more.

Just as briefings are generally better without «COMES NOW», discovery is generally better without Bates stamps, also known as Bates numbering. What for? First, let`s discuss the history of the Bates stamp.