Rarely is a piece of software released that so perfectly accomplishes what it was designed to do. Easy Bates is one of those perfectly simple products - and an essential tool which no litigation paralegal should be without.
Bates Stamping is one of those arduous, monotonous, time consuming, anachronistic tasks that is [was] the bane of a paralegal's existence (right up there with summarizing depositions). In the old days - Bates Stamping was a manual task involving the literal stamping of numbers on individual pages so that one could track the paper throughout course of litigating a case. Over the years, paralegals moved to using Avery return address labels and Word or WordPerfect because you could then mix in alphanumeric characters to designate the source of the documents - and even which case they were related to. Easy Bates provides paralegals with a technological quantum leap forward.
The program allows you to quickly number tens of thousands of PDF pages with whatever numbering scheme you desire - including a rambling confidentiality statement, source designator, docket number, or whatever else you might want to include on the face of the document. Moreover, the program can automatically shrink the PDF page just enough so that the numbering never overlaps the text of the actual document - and those numbers are all searchable in PDF. Want to rename the files based on the bates number? How about renaming the pages? Not a problem. Oops - want to remove the numbering - or renumber? There is a handy tool for doing those tasks.
The software displays a nice screen output which includes the file names and corresponding Bates ranges for those files. Copying and pasting those names into Excel (with the clever use of the concatenate and hyperlink formulas in Excel) results in a down and dirty - and dirt cheap - litigation support program. We like to use the =LEFT(a1,11) formula to break out the Bates numbers into individual columns within the Excel spreadsheet. If you are tricky, you can create a nice little formula that shows you the number of pages in each file - and doing a quicksum gives you the ability to immediately identify how many pages were produced on what day in respond to which request for production.
Kudos to Rennie Glen Software, LLC for making an outstanding product. Most litigation copy shops charge at least $0.02 per page to Bates Stamp documents. At $199 per license, Easy Bates pays for itself in less than two banker's boxes (10K pages) worth of documents. Ask any paralegal - that's a steal!
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