How to Add Bates Numbering to a PDF (Legal Discovery, Free)

If you're producing documents for litigation — responding to a discovery request, assembling exhibits, or organizing a case file — every page needs a unique identifier. Not "page 7 of the March contract," but a single ID that means the same page to you, opposing counsel, the court reporter and the judge. That identifier is the Bates number, named after the 19th-century hand-stamping machine that lawyers once rolled across every sheet. Here's how to apply one to PDFs in a browser, free.

What Bates numbering is — and why continuity matters

A Bates number is a stamped label, usually in a page corner, with two parts:

• Prefix — identifies the producing party or matter: SMITH, ACME, DEF.
• Padded sequence — a fixed-width number that increments on every page: 000001, 000002, …

Together: SMITH000001. Fixed-width padding keeps numbers sortable and uniform; the prefix keeps your production distinct from the other side's.

The part that trips people up is continuity across files. A production is rarely one PDF — it's dozens of contracts, email exports and reports. The Bates sequence must run through all of them as one unbroken series: if the first file ends at SMITH000042, the second file's first page is SMITH000043. Number each file from 000001 separately and you've produced forty pages that all claim to be SMITH000001 — ambiguous citations, a confused record, and an easy objection for opposing counsel. Unexplained gaps are just as bad: they look like withheld documents. Continuous, machine-applied numbering avoids both.

How to add Bates numbers — step by step

🔒 pdfty.com/en/tools/bates-numbering

Choosing a sane numbering scheme

A few conventions that make life easier downstream:

• Keep the prefix short and stable. Party name or matter abbreviation, all caps, no spaces: SMITH, not Smith Family Trust 2024. You'll be typing it into citations for months.
• Pad generously. Six digits (000001) covers a million pages and keeps every number the same width. Re-padding mid-production is not an option, so start wider than you think you need.
• Record your ranges. Keep a simple log of which Bates range each source document received — SMITH000001–000042 = 2023 Services Agreement. Your production cover letter will need it.
• Never renumber produced documents. Once a page has been cited as SMITH000017, that number is permanent. New documents continue the sequence; they never restart it.

Alternatives, honestly compared

• Adobe Acrobat Pro has the long-standing Bates feature (Edit PDF → More → Bates Numbering) and handles huge batches — but it's a paid subscription, heavy for the occasional production.
• Free desktop viewers (Acrobat Reader, SumatraPDF, Preview) cannot Bates-stamp at all. macOS Preview has no stamping feature beyond annotations.
• Scripting it with free libraries (e.g. Python's pypdf/reportlab) works and scales, if someone on the team writes and maintains the script — and gets the cross-file continuity logic right.
• Generic watermark tools can stamp static text but can't increment a counter per page — a Watermark that says "CONFIDENTIAL" on every page is a different job than a unique number on each page.

For a small firm or an occasional production under 20 MB per file, a free browser tool covers the whole workflow without the Acrobat license.

Practical gotchas

• Stamp placement vs content. Bottom-right is conventional, but check your documents: scans with tight margins or footers can collide with the stamp. Preview a few pages before producing hundreds.
• Confidentiality legends. Productions often pair the Bates number with "CONFIDENTIAL" under a protective order. If you add one as a separate watermark pass, stamp Bates numbers last so nothing overlaps them.
• Combine-then-stamp vs stamp-per-file. Uploading files together in order keeps them separate but continuously numbered — usually what a production needs. Merging everything into one PDF first (see how to merge PDFs without Adobe) also works but loses the per-document file boundaries.
• Scanned files first need to be PDFs. Paper exhibits photographed on a phone should go through JPG to PDF before stamping — the stamp applies to PDF pages.
• Check the output before producing. Verify the first and last number of each file against your range log. Thirty seconds of checking beats a motion about numbering irregularities.

Frequently asked questions

What does a Bates number look like?

Prefix plus a zero-padded counter: SMITH000001, ACME-000457, DEF000012. Format varies by firm; uniqueness and sequence don't.

Can I number several PDFs as one continuous sequence?

Yes — that's the core feature. Upload the files in production order and the counter runs through all of them without resetting.

Can I start from a number other than 1?

Yes. If your last production ended at SMITH000846, start this one at 847 — continuing an existing series is the normal case, not the exception.

Where on the page does the stamp go?

You choose; bottom-right is the near-universal convention in US practice. Pick a corner that doesn't collide with your documents' existing footers.

Is the stamp permanent?

It's drawn into the page content like printed text, not added as an annotation someone can delete in a viewer. (As with any stamp, a determined editor with PDF software could alter the file — which is why productions are exchanged with the numbers already applied and logged.)

Does it work on scanned documents?

Yes — the stamp is applied on top of the page image. The scan itself remains non-searchable unless you run OCR on it, which is worth doing before production anyway so documents are text-searchable for review.

What are the free limits?

20 MB and 50 pages per file, 10 operations per day — free, no sign-up, no watermark. Files are deleted from the server within 1 hour. Pro ($9/mo) lifts the limits, which matters for large productions.

Bates numbering vs page numbers — which do I need?

If pages must be uniquely citable across a whole document set: Bates. If a single document just needs 1, 2, 3 for reading: Page Numbers.