Bates numbering (also known as Bates stamping or Bates coding) is used in the legal, medical, and business fields to place identifying numbers and/or date/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 Stamping can be used to mark and identify images with copyrights by putting a company name, logo and/or legal copyright on them. This process provides identification, protection, and auto-increment numbering of the images.
Bates numbering is commonly used as an organizational method to label and identify legal documents. During the discovery phase of litigation, a large number of documents might necessitate the use of unique identifiers for each page of each document for reference and retrieval. In law a lawsuit is a civil action brought before a Court in which the party commencing the action the Plaintiff, seeks a legal or equitable remedy Bates numbering (named for the Bates automatic numbering machine), assigns an arbitrary unique identifier to each page. With reference to a given (possibly implicit set of objects a unique identifier is any Identifier which is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects Such "numbering" may be solely numeric or may contain a combination of letters and numbers (alphanumeric). Alphanumeric is a is Portmanteau of Alphabetic and Numeric and is used to describe the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits There is no standard method for numbering documents. Examples of Bates numbers schemes used in tobacco cases may be found here.
Manual Bates stamping uses a self inking stamp with numbered wheels (5, 6, and 7-wheeled models are common) that automatically increment each time the stamp is pressed down on a page (some stamps allow for duplicate documents by only incrementing after two or more presses). Today, preprinted, self-adhesive labels are common as is electronic document discovery (EDD) software that can electronically "stamp" documents stored as computer files by superimpsoing numbers onto them.
It is widely-held that the character Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is named for this document enumeration process. Patrick Bateman is a Fictional character, the Anti-hero and Narrator of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho is a Thriller novel by Bret Easton Ellis published in 1991 Bateman uses a Bates stamp to number his victims.
The Bates Automatic Numbering Machine was patented in 1891-93 by the Bates Manufacturing Company of Edison, NJ. [1]
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