PDF Bates Stamper

Bates numbering comes from the pre-digital legal world: a hand-fed stamping machine imprinted a unique sequential number on each page of a document production. The point was never typography — it was reference. When counsel says "see BATES-004213," everyone opens the same page, regardless of how the set was copied, scanned or re-exported. Courts and firms still rely on that property today: a Bates number is a stable, unique page identifier that survives reformatting.

What most people get wrong is treating the number as a stamp of authenticity. A Bates number proves nothing about who produced a page or when — that comes from the accompanying certificate of production and the firm's records. This tool does exactly one job honestly: it draws the sequential numbers your scheme defines, in the position you choose, on every page, without a $240/year Acrobat subscription standing in the way.

Best practices, from how paralegals actually use this: keep one unnumbered master copy of every set and stamp only working copies, because stamped numbers can't be cleanly removed. Agree the prefix and digit count before you start a production — "EXH-001" and "EXH-0001" sorting differently will haunt you. And place the number consistently; bottom-right is the convention because it rarely collides with signatures or letterhead, but the only real rule is that it doesn't obscure text and stays identical across the whole production.