Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional includes a built-in ability to Bates Number large numbers of PDF files. If your litigation produces PDF files, Acrobat 8 Professional could be the way to go. This post provides a quick primer on Acrobat’s capability with links to more detailed information. An upcoming post will cover the enhancements made in Acrobat 9 Professional.

This Adobe blog article covers Bates Numbering including a number of screenshots. A couple of highlights include the following.

Adding files:

Configuring the layout

This Adobe Design Center page provides some screenshots on a graphical PDF page.

Configuring the layout on a graphical page

The final graphical page

A potential problem with Acrobat’s XML Tag method for Bates Numbering is mentioned in this Appligent Labs post which states:

So, instead of simply correctly numbering each and every page; applications that attempt to use this information will need to calculate the Bates number based on the above XML attributes. Easy enough; except, lawyers tend to split documents apart and append them back together in different ways. So, in some cases, this mechanism will be worse then useless, because the wrong number will be returned.

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