The Ultimate Guide of Best Practices for Bates Numbering
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Does your legal team want to enhance document clarity, accessibility, and compliance? Then they’ll need to follow Bates numbering best practices, regardless if your team uses Bates numbering software or not. As our previous articles on this topic explained, electronic Bates numbering is indispensable for eDiscovery and review. In fact, Bates numbering is still important in the age of AI .
But how exactly do you go about legal document numbering through the Bates system to ensure smooth and efficient document management in trial preparation and throughout a case? This article helps you uncover just that.
Here, we have compiled critical Bates numbering best practices, unearthing the proper techniques to help your team tackle document review and management through clarity and easy access.
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Understanding Legal Document Numbering with Bates Numbering
Also called Bates stamping, this method is integral in eDiscovery, legal document management, record management and data parsing. So, what exactly is it? Bates numbering is a system used for numbering legal documents to organize and identify them by assigning a unique, sequential number to each page within a set of documents. This number is meant to serve as an identifier or reference number so that the document that gets labeled is easy to find.
In document review and eDiscovery, this is crucial, as it enables legal professionals to identify, index, retrieve, and track documents. This way, everyone from the paralegal to the partner can stay in the know and on track of key documents. It also ensures nothing gets lost or slips through the cracks, as all documents get accounted for, and your document set remains organized.
Before we delve into the best practices of eDiscovery Bates numbering, it is fundamental to know the basic ways to apply Bates numbers to documents. The most common method involves merging a prefix or suffix to the document number if you want to take the alphanumeric approach. For example, let's say a document uses the number 123. To create a Bates number or stamp, you would add the prefix XYZ, making the Bates number to be XYZ123.
Bates Numbering Best Practices
Bates numbering best practices incorporate a range of fundamental principles that enhance document clarity, accessibility, and compliance and help show you how to Bates stamp with ease.
Did you know that many standard ESI protocols explicitly require parties to agree on Bates numbering rules, such as format, prefix, zero-padding, unique party prefixes, number of digits, etc.? The Sedona Conference has a list of ESI-protocol topics that explicitly includes Bates numbering requirements.
We’ve compiled ten best practices offering actionable strategies encompassing consistent numbering formats, unobtrusive placement, and integration with digital solutions. By adopting these practices, individuals and organizations can comprehensively understand Bates numbering’s significance and harness its benefits for improved document control and enhanced legal proceedings.
- Use only one Bates number per document
Bates numbers should never overlap. That’s because when two or more documents have the same Bates number, it will be difficult for reviewers to determine which document it belongs to, thus making both documents harder to reference. This leads to chaos and will likely result in team members missing key information or referencing the wrong document. This essentially defeats the purpose of Bates stamping, which is to ease document identification, retrieval and tracking.
As such, use a unique Bates number for every document to steer clear of this issue. This may likely involve creating a different numbering system for your different document types, which will ensure all documents have their own unique Bates stamp, with no overlap.
- Maintain a sequential order
A fundamental pillar of Bates numbering, sequential order maintenance assigns Bates numbers to documents systematically and chronologically. In turn, it makes for seamless document management, reference, and retrieval. This best practice is key for preserving the integrity of legal proceedings, audits, and document reviews; it also helps ensure that nothing gets lost or overlooked.
Maintaining sequential order also bears importance, due to the fact that a chronological sequence establishes a clear historical timeline when you label document numbers in such a way. This comes in handy during legal proceedings, as you’ll need to formulate a cohesive narrative. When you don’t maintain a sequential order, it leads to documents being improperly presented, with much of the context lost, giving way to misinterpretations and other confusion.
- Maintain uniformity in the number of digits with leading zeros
Use leading zeros; this will ensure all the pages have the same number of digits and maintain uniformity. Consider the following scenario: when you create Bates numbers for a document with 1,000 pages and don’t use leading zeros, then all the pages won’t have the same number of digits. This is due to the first page being numbered “1”, the second page being numbered “2”, and so on.
But then the 1000th page will be numbered “1000”. This will result in problems when you attempt to sort the pages numerically, as the computer will determine that the Bates stamp of “1000” is greater than all the other numbers, thereby placing it at the end of the list, which is not always contextually correct.
On the contrary, when you use leading zeros, all of the pages will then have uniformity in the number of digits – in this scenario, that means they’ll all have four digits, as the first page will be numbered as “0001,” while the second page will be numbered “0002,” and so on. This method ensures the pages in your set get correctly sorted when you intend to order them numerically.
It’s better to nip any potential issues in the bud, so you should always incorporate leading zeros into your documents.
- Opt for batch numbering if you need to group like items and categorize
Especially useful for maintaining efficient time management, batch numbering assigns sequential Bates numbers to groups of documents that are in some way related and does so concurrently. This method is known for its time-saving advantage, as batch numbering expedites document review and processing.
In instances that involve extensive sets of documents, it is best not to number each item individually, as this is time-consuming and likely to lead to errors. Instead, in the practice of batch numbering, legal professionals and reviewers assign unique identifiers to groups of like documents. In turn, this optimizes workflows it maintains sequential order while streamlining the process.
Ideal for grouping together like documents when dealing with extensive sets of documents, this practice enhances efficiency through categorization. For example, in complex legal cases with thousands of emails, this method enables legal teams to promptly categorize and reference email chains, attachments, and related correspondences. Thus, batch numbering forges more efficient organization. In this way, batch numbering also simplifies the document review, which is especially useful when dealing with contracts, financial records, and other extensive document sets.
- Create more understandability and context with descriptive prefixes
Many times, using random letters and numbers alone isn’t particularly useful in legal document numbering. That’s where adding descriptive prefixes becomes a potent best practice. In this method, you would add informative prefixes to Bates numbers as a means of adding much-needed context to the nature and content of each document.
In doing so, your document retrieval and parsing becomes all the more comprehendible. This is because the significance that descriptive prefixes offer is their ability to provide additional and instantly understandable context to the documents they label. Without these prefixes, you would have to rely solely on numerical identifiers, which don’t explicitly point out the nature of each document. Thus, it would be challenging to understand what kind of document the numbers represent.
On the contrary, by infusing Bates numbers with descriptive prefixes, such as “CONTRACT,” “EMAIL,” or “MEMO,” legal practitioners can swiftly discern the nature of each document, speeding up identifying and evaluating critical information.
It therefore becomes easier to spot specific document types when you apply descriptive prefixes, which, in turn, quickens all document-intensive activities such as audits and legal proceedings. For example, in a litigation case with a wide range of exhibits, descriptive prefixes ensure legal professionals can swiftly identify if an exhibit is a contract, an email, or a photograph. This is crucial for the retrieval of specific documents during key moments in a trial, empowering attorneys to present their cases with confidence.
- Avoid adding more pages or contents in the process of your numbering
Assigning Bates numbers should be done in a single pass; that is, you should never go back and add more pages or contents (a major pointer on how to Bates stamp , PDFs, photos, etc.) while you are in the process of creating this numbering system. You should also refrain from adding these additional contents after you’ve created all your Bates numbers for your documents.
This is because when you label a document with a Bates number, you are creating a unique identifier for each page, regardless of whether it is solely numeric or alphanumeric. The number must remain as a unique identifier for each page you label. But when you return to a document set to add more content or pages, you are effectively undermining this goal.
That’s because by going back and adding more pages or content to a document, or even if you simply renumber your pages, you will arrive at duplicate identifiers. Thus, confusion will arise when you need to refer to a specific page or image, as you won’t be able to tell which one is which. Essentially, you are taking away the most basic property of a Bates number which is uniqueness of the number for accurate and easy reference.
Thus, we suggest creating your Bates numbering once and not adding any additional changes.
- Keep Consistency in the Formatting
This is a key best practice for warding off complexities and surplus contents in your Bates stamps. Legal document numbering doesn’t need to be any more confusing or difficult for legal professionals. As such, we recommend you remain consistent in the way you format your Bates numbers.
What happens when you don’t label your numbers in a consistent manner? It will become challenging to know where one document ends and where another one begins.
While you don’t have to limit your Bates numbers on all documents, as there are a few different ways you can format them, you still need to have them follow consistent formats in each set. For example, in a previous best practice we mentioned adding descriptive prefixes which can provide context on the document type (memo, email, photo, etc.)
Adding to this, you can also include the date in your Bates stamps, or even the time. For example, “ABC0001-02051992,” “ABC0001-0325.”
Regardless of how you choose to format your Bates numbers, you ought to make sure you are consistent with your formatting so that they are easy to reference and understand by everyone.
- Add richer context with metadata
To add a more contextual aspect to your Bates numbering, you can do so by adding metadata. This method involves embedding the relevant metadata of your choice to your Bates stamps. In doing so, you are essentially providing richer context to make your documents and their contents all the more understandable and easier to immediately reference.
Helping you efficiently spot, retrieve and analyze documents, metadata provides an additional layer of depth to your document organization. This layer equips your Bates numbers with key contextual information. The significance of it is supplying comprehensive information about the documents you number. This helps you wade through complex audits and legal cases.
What kind of metadata should you use? You can apply metadata, such as document titles, authors, owners, creation dates, and topics, all of which provide additional context for the Bates number, enriching your understanding of the document or page it represents. Here are a few examples of such metadata that you can incorporate into your Bates stamping: “OWNER NAME,” “FILING DATE,” and “PATENT NAME.”
Metadata is especially useful in legal proceedings where the origin and significance of evidence influences case outcomes. For example, in a case where a wide array of documents must be referenced, Bates stamps with metadata allow legal teams to immediately identify a report’s subject or a contract’s date.
- Account for all your documents, including native files
While much of your electronically stored information (ESI) will come in the form of documents that are not in their original format—given how much documents are altered, downloaded as new files and converted into new files—some of the documents you manage will be in their native formats.
The term native format entails the original, unaltered and unedited state of a document. Native format documents can be in any format, but they’re usually Word or PDF documents. When you work on Bates stamping, remember that your native files need to be numbered just like all your other, non-native files are required.
This is because if you have ever had to produce the original files of a document, you will be required to make sure that the Bates numbers on those are accurate, much like they would need to be with other files. If you don’t apply Bates numbering to the native files, then you will not be able to prove that the Bates numbers on the edited documents are correct.
Therefore, we highly recommend your legal team not forget about numbering native files when undertaking the Bates approach to legal document numbering.
- Conduct routine quality assurance
It is not uncommon for errors, incorrect numbers, lack of due diligence or other mishaps to take place during or after you produce your Bates stamps. It is therefore important to conduct regular quality checks. Doing so ensures your team maintains the integrity of the documents and everything they entail, such as their follow-up activities and the case at large.
You can provide quality assurance by engaging in regular quality checks that are systematic in nature. Use these to verify the accuracy, consistency and completeness of your Bates numbering efforts throughout various documents. Conducting these checks allows you to identify and correct any inconsistencies, errors or inaccuracies in your Bates numbering projects.
Conducting checks for quality assurance allows your legal team to avoid the repercussions of misinterpretations, difficulties in identifying or finding a document, missing evidence and any other legal challenges. Through regular, QA checkups, you can review and validate your Bates stamps with their documents and chronological order. You can also prevent or avoid misnumbering and missing documents, which will negatively affect the case. All in all, avoid being negligent with your numbering and conduct routine quality checks.
Never Fret Over Document Review and eDiscovery Again
In eDiscovery, details matter, and Bates numbering is one of those details that underpins the integrity of the entire review and production process. The good news is that with today’s legal technology, implementing consistent, automated, and defensible numbering is easier than ever. By aligning on best practices and leveraging the right tools, legal teams can reduce risk, improve efficiency, and maintain a clear audit trail from collection through production. At its core, Bates numbering isn’t just about stamping documents, as it’s about building trust in your data, your processes, and ultimately, your outcomes.
The sheer volume of ECI that legal teams must review and manage can be overwhelming and this amount tends to grow over time. But don’t fret; work with Consilio’s dedicated legal consultants to help you with all your eDiscovery and document review needs. But we don’t just talk the talk.
Bates Numbering FAQ
What is Bates numbering used for?
Bates numbering is a way to assign unique, sequential identifiers to each page or file in a legal production. It makes it easy for lawyers, courts, and reviewers to reference exact documents during discovery, depositions, or trial without confusion.
How do you add Bates numbers to a PDF?
Most eDiscovery tools and even Adobe Acrobat allow you to apply Bates numbers automatically. You can set the prefix, numbering style, and location on the page, then batch-stamp entire document sets. This ensures every page is uniquely tracked across large productions.
What are Bates numbering best practices?
Use a consistent prefix, zero-padded numbers (e.g., ABC-000001), and sequential numbering across the entire production. Decide early whether to number by page or document. Document your approach in the ESI protocol, and avoid restarting sequences mid-production to prevent confusion later.
