Acrobat for Legal Professionals

Bates Numbering is the process of sequentially numbering legal documents.

Acrobat 8 and 9 Pro allow you to apply and remove Bates Numbers to documents. To try it yourself, choose Advanced—> Document Processing—> Bates Numbering:

The ability to remove Bates Numbers is valuable in case you make a mistake during the numbering process. However, due to the adversarial nature of the legal business, attorneys may desire to limit what the other side can do with documents.

To whit, this email I received from an attorney last week:

What can I use to flatten Bates numbers so that they cannot be altered or removed using the Acrobat Bates numbering process?

I know I can print to PDF, save as TIFF, print-then-scan, etc., but am looking for a solution that will work in batch mode and not degrade the appearance of the file. Also, I don’t favor using security settings because I don’t want to restrict the user’s ability to access the file.

In this article, I’ll discuss how to "lock down" Bates Numbers so that they cannot be removed by Acrobat’s "Remove Bates" option.

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Acrobat 8 introduced Bates Numbering and and additional features and performance enhancements were made in Acrobat 9 Pro.

Last week, I got this e-mail message from a paralegal:

I don’t like Adobe’s mandatory 6 digit bate stamp. Why did they do that? I like to bate stamp with just single digits. It is more simple that way.

You might be aware that the custom is to Bates stamp discovery documents using six digits including leading zeros. However, that might not meet the needs of everyone. Some folks like to use four digits and others, like my most recent emailer above, wanted to use just one.

You might assume that Acrobat requires you to use a minimum of six digits for Bates numbering.

In fact, if when you Bates stamp (Advanced—> Document Processing Bates Numbering—> Add . . . ) and insert a Bates stamp you cannot change the number of leading digits through the standard dialog:

Actually, let me take that back. You can try, but Acrobat will give you an error:

Fortunately, there is an easy workaround that allows you to Bates Number with only one digit. Read on to learn how. Along the way, you will also learn all you need to use Bates Numbering in Acrobat..

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I like to think of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional as the “legal release” of Acrobat. Version 8 adds features that are important to the legal industry. Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at some of these new legal-specific features.

In this article, we’ll examine the new Bates Numbering feature.

NOTE: Since I wrote this article, newer version of Acrobat have enhanced the Bates Numbering functionality.

What is Bates Numbering

Law firms and the courts have unique numbering needs when sharing discovery documents. Counsels, opposing counsel and the courts have the need to utilize a common numbering system when referring to documents.

For example, imagine a case involving 350, 2-4 page Word files and a banker’s box containing 5000 pages of printed documents, papers and receipts. How can all the parties easily refer to one of the Word files or a single receipt from the box?

The Bates Company—about 1865—invented an automatic stamping machine that numbered progressively. Each time the machine was pressed down onto a sheet of paper, a rotating wheel incremented by one. Pages were numbered using a six-digit sequence. For example, page 921 in a document set would be 000921. Courts and law firms quickly adopted this system which is commonly referred to as Bates Numbering.

Document sets may also be given a unique set numbers or prefixes which might include a set number, case number, firm name, etc. For example, all receipts might be treated separately and grouped into sets of 500 pages.

To refer to the 1132nd receipt, we might use the prefix:
Jones Receipts Set 3: 001132

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