BATES NUMBERING - LITIGATION

 From wikipedia: 

"Bates numbering is commonly used as an organizational method to label and identify legal documents. Nearly all American law firms use Bates stamps, though the use of manual hand-stamping is becoming increasingly rare because of the rise in electronic numbering — mostly in Portable Document Format (PDF) files rather than printed material. During the discovery phase of litigation, a large number of documents might require the use of unique identifiers for each page of each document for reference and retrieval. Bates numbering, named for the Bates Automatic Numbering-Machine, assigns an arbitrary unique identifier to each page. Such identification may be solely numeric or may contain a combination of letters and numbers (alphanumeric). There is no standard method for numbering documents, nor is there a standard type face used for such numbers.

Manual Bates stampers use a self-inking mechanism with four to seven numbered wheels. Some stampers allow for consecutive, repeat, duplicate, and triplicate numbering.

Self-adhesive labels printed with Bates numbers are common today, as is electronic discovery (eDiscovery) software that can electronically "stamp" documents stored as computer files by superimposing numbers onto them.

Bates numbering is neither universally used nor consistently applied; for example, The Bluebook style guide does not reference it. But, consistent with The Bluebook, the first citation should make it very clear what is being referenced, such as (Bates Jones000001) or (Bates d123-002), and subsequent consecutive cites should follow the usual practice of Id. followed by the page number, such as (Id. 000017) or (Id. -017)."