Bates number

The convention

A Bates number is usually a prefix identifying the producing party or the matter, followed by a zero-padded sequence: JONES000001, JONES000002, and so on. The prefix keeps productions from different parties distinguishable; the padding keeps them sortable.

The padding is not decoration. A set numbered without it sorts as 1, 10, 100, 2 in essentially every file browser and most databases, which is a small disaster to discover halfway through a deposition.

Why the sequence matters more than the number

Once a page is stamped, that number is its name for the rest of the case. It appears in the privilege log, in deposition exhibits, in motion practice, and in any dispute about what was produced. Two properties follow:

Numbers are never reused. Each number identifies exactly one page, for the life of the matter.

Gaps are meaningful. If the production runs from JONES000001 to JONES004500 and pages 200 through 240 are missing, the receiving party is entitled to know why. That is normally because those documents were withheld and are accounted for in a privilege log — which is why the usual practice is to number everything first and pull withheld documents afterwards, so the withheld material has stable identifiers.

Email and the pagination problem

Stamping email is where sets go wrong, because unlike scanned paper, an email’s page count is created by whatever rendered it. Two tools paginate the same message differently. A production assembled from messages printed by three different people through three different clients will not have consistent page counts, and reconciling it after stamping is manual work.

The fix is to render the whole set through one pipeline before numbering. Preparing email PDFs for Bates numbering covers the sequence.

The name

From the Bates Automatic Numbering Machine, a self-incrementing hand stamp patented in the 1890s. The device is long obsolete and the name stuck.