Bates Numbering is tricky in Word. We’ll explain how to add this special numbering system to Word documents and why it’s not recommended in most situations.
What is Bates Numbering?
Bates Numbering is a way to add a fixed number or serial number system to each page of a document. It’s often used in legal, medical and business to reference a location/page in a long filing.
Originally there were number stamps like this:
These days Bates Numbering is done on a computer, most commonly on a PDF file for reasons that will become obvious.
Bates Numbering in Word
Can’t be done in Word – at least not reliably and with the certainty required by courts and other formal settings.
You’d think that Bates Numbers would be easy in Word because it’s just an extension of the existing Page Numbers in a header or footer with a code for the case or topic plus a page number.
Number formatting lets you add a special look with a prefix and leading zeros by changing the \# setting in the field code.
The problem is that Word will change the page numbering when the document is edited. Bates Numbering has to be fixed and unchanging once it’s applied. That can’t be guaranteed with a Word document where even changing the margins or paper size will renumber the pages.
There are other issues like Word page numbers can’t go past 32,767 which is possible in a long court filing. The {SEQ …} field code is an alternative numbering system but it still doesn’t get around the repagination issue.
A Word document could be marked as ‘Read Only’ or even password protected to prevent changes at Info | Protect Document but that’s not enough for formal purposes.
If that wasn’t enough, in many cases the Bates Numbering is applied to more than one document that’s combined into a single file. A court filing could be a combination of documents, spreadsheets, emails and more into a single file which is then numbered.
Bates Numbering in PDFs
For all those reasons, it’s normal to apply Bates Numbering to a PDF file instead. PDF’s have fixed pagination (more or less).
The PDF can be saved from a Word document or many PDFs combined into a single big file.
There are special legal ‘ediscovery’ software packages that handle Bates Numbering of PDF’s as well as other tasks required by courts.
Adobe’s Acrobat tools have a specific Bates Numbering option for PDFs. These features will update the numbering if pages are added, removed or rearranged in the PDF.
