Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard has the ability to do Bates-style numbering, like you often see on document production in discovery. I used it today to number the appendix for a brief to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and it really made things easy on me.
It is not obvious, but this walkthrough should help you get it right the first time.
First, open up the document you want to number. If you are going to produce a lot of different documents, it would be easier to put them together into one, big PDF.
Go to Document > Header & Footer > Add…
The Add Header and Footer dialog will come up. I usually put numbering in the lower right, so I use the Right Footer Text box. If you want to do Bates-style numbering, use this format: <<000001>>. You can start at whatever number you want, though, and add a prefix (such as App. <<1>> for an appellate appendix).
Note that, although the preview shows the brackets, they will not show up in the document. Hit OK, and the numbers will show up on every page.
This can save you a lot of time and paper when you are putting together documents for discovery. (Although it took me about a ream of paper before I found this feature and figured out how to use it.)
Sam Glover is the founder and co-owner of Lawyerist. He is also a Minnesota business attorney for geeks, a consumer rights advocate, and an espresso snob. 
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Sam,
Good tip. But a better solution is to use the Bates Numbering feature within Acrobat Pro. This can apply true Bates numbers across a set of PDF files. See here for more info:
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2006/09/acrobat_8_new_f.html
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/9.0/Professional/WS6DE1E376-6A82-406c-A711-6C5E5207A1F2.w.html
Dave Stromfeld
Adobe
Yes, but I do not have Acrobat Pro, and this works just fine.
Another handy little feature when doing this is to click the Appearance Options. A box pops up with the option to “Shrink document to avoid overwriting the document’s text and graphics.”
This way, you can always see your bates numbers and you dont overwrite anything.
Sam,
Not sure if you are familiar with pdfDocs Desktop – but it is a PDF creation and management application designed specifically for the legal profession. Integrates into MS Office, MS SharePoint and all leading document management systems – Autonomy iManage, NetDocuments, Open Text eDOCS DM, DOCS Open and Worldox without requiring special connectors or plug-ins.
Provides solutions for specific legal workflow – collation, annotation, redaction, file splitting, bates numbering, Closing Book creation and more.
New release provides PDF matter folders — drag and drop an entire matter folder (retaining matter structure) into the application and publish as a secure PDF (or multiple PDF documents). Also provides dual integration with a DMS and MS SharePoint.
See recent piece in Technolawyer on the pdfDocs Desktop 3.1 release. http://www.docscorp.com/public/pdf/newsletters/TL_desktop31.pdf
Thanks
Is there a way to change the format of page numbers?
I followed the instructions to perform the bates stamping in Adobe Acrobat Standard 9, but the numbers do not move forward. In other words, every page in my document is now numbered as 000001. I tried adding the number in the right footer text box with brackets <> thinking that this may tell the computer to advance the number on each page, but the brackets appeared on the document, and the number never advanced beyond 1. Any suggestions.
You have to use double brackets. Or just select the box where you want the page numbers to appear, and click Insert Page Number.
The poster who noted problems with the numbering not working (<> showing up on all pages) is correct in Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard. The obvious quick fix is to spend the money on the Pro Edition. But absent that as a viable solution I found a workable and practical solution for Adobe 9 Standard users.
Get to the header/footer link and click in the box where you want the bates to show up (left footer text/center footer text/right footer text) and then click Insert Page Number. At that point the program will insert this–<>. No worries. Click the blue link that says Page Number and Date Format…
Click the page starts at link and plug in 100000 or 100001. Voila! Bates numbers!
Contact all that need to know and tell them that your bates numbering will be 100000 et seq. and that they are to use other numbers.
By the way…you can put any text before the symbols and it will appear. Example….Def Bates No.<> will appear as Def Bates No. 100001.
That’s it!