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 a business and consumer rights lawyer and the creator of Lawyerist.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
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.....new_f.html
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Ac.....1F2.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.....ktop31.pdf
Thanks