Bates numbering

Bates numbering is used in the legal, medical, and business fields to place one or more of identifying numbers, date and time marks on images and documents as they are scanned or processed, for example, during the discovery stage of preparations for trial or identifying business receipts.

Bates obtained several US patents for the device in the late 1800s and early 1900s,[1] and in 1895 he received a Longstreth award from the Franklin Institute for his invention of a typographic number machine.

[2] The earliest patent claimed a "new and useful improvement in Consecutive-Numbering Machines",[3] indicating that Bates was not the originator of the idea.

[citation needed] In later versions, the machine could be set to stamp the number multiple times, i.e., duplicates or triplicates.

[7] 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.