Today we're going to talk about how to add bait stamps to any document. Bait stamps are a way of individually identifying any page tendered in discovery during litigation. And the term baits and stamp comes from either a company or a person named Bates that had a stamping machine and you would stamp the pages and every time you stamped it, it would advance by a number one, two, three, four, five. Unfortunately, we are way past that or hopefully the place where you're working at.
is way past that and we can digitally assign bait stamps. And it's super easy if you have Adobe Acrobat DC. Unfortunately, it's not going to work for the free version of Adobe Acrobat.
You're going to need a paid version. The standard version will work if you can still get that. But let me open up this PDF.
I picked a random PDF. I got a service manual for a computer that we have here. One of my favorites, by the way, the XPS 15. But let me close up this bookmark section here and we'll take a look at just the PDF.
And I'm going to look at it. zooming to page level, which is what they used to call fit to height, but now it's zoom to page level. And here you can see this is the pages of this PDF.
I just picked a random one that had a lot of pages in it. So to add the bait stamps, you're going to come over here. And if you don't see the toolbars and you only see these icons, you can hit this little triangle and open up the toolbar area. And you're going to go to enhance scans.
And at the top, you'll see a couple of tools. There's even more tools there if you need them, but it's called. Bates Numbering and we're going to add Bates Numbering.
Once this comes up, you're going to get a little pop-up. You can add more files to this if you have a whole bunch of things that you're going to send off. Let's say you have like 30 PDFs that you need to supplementally produce to the other side and you can just sequentially number them. So it makes it really easy if you're doing one or a number of exhibits.
I only have one here right now. I'm going to hit okay. Then I'm going to get a pop-up and I have a couple of things that I can pick.
I could pick the font. I could pick the size. I'm usually going to go with like a 10 to 12. Some people like to make their bait stamps really big.
Usually those people don't see very well. I like to make them small so they're not distracting to the jury. The only people that need to see bait stamps are attorneys, really, and hopefully the hot seat or two can see them. So it's not really something that juries need to see, but maybe your witnesses might need to see them at depositions, things like that.
So it's something that you want to make sure is on there, but doesn't need to be huge and in your face. So 10 is usually pretty good, in my opinion. Then you've got six boxes here. And these boxes are the different like regions of the paper that you can put your bait stamp. I usually like the lower right hand side.
Most people pick the lower right hand side. So I'm going to click this right footer text and then click on insert baits number. Once I do that, then I need to tell it a couple of basic pieces of information.
The default number of digits it's asking for is like how many, like, is it not going to start at number one? It'll start at, if there are six digits, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1. So that's like the six digits there. And so I think that's usually way too many. I like four digits. If you have a really long exhibit, that one long exhibit, you can add more.
But for the most part, four is plenty. And then I always like to add a prefix. Usually the person producing it adds their own prefix.
I'll just add GTC just so you guys can get an idea of what it looks like. Hit OK. And then what you'll see is a visual depiction.
on the bottom here of those six zones that you can choose from. And in this right photo text area, it's added like a little snippet of code or something kind of like code that tells it, you know, the Bates number and what prefix and the number of digits. So if you need to, if you want to tinker with that, just typing in the code, you can do that, or you can have this little wizard pop up and it'll generate that code for you. This gives you an idea of what it is.
If you want to nudge it over or move it, you can use these buttons to do it. So let's say I want to move over a little bit from the right margin. I can increase that margin and make it move over. Or if I want to bury it in a corner, I can move it even further over like that. I'll just leave it at all the defaults for now just so we can get a view of what that looks like and hit OK.
It takes not that long. It goes through it relatively quickly. I've already got the notification telling me that all 94 pages of this document have been bait stamped. And if you look in the lower right-hand corner, you could see that bait stamp there. And I'll just keep hitting down so we could see all the pages.
And those are the bait stamps. Right? But you might run into an issue where you've got this page here and you need to move that bait stamp.
So what do you do about that situation? There's a couple of things that you can do. One of the things that you can do is you can close this Enhanced Scans tab and go to the Edit section and Edit.
And then use this hand tool to actually move that thing over. So let's click on Edit and then move this over. There we go. Now I can move that one.
And I moved just that one bait stamp. If I hit close, then I can see that that's there. But the rest of the pages, the bait stamp is all in the right regular spot.
So if you need to move just one, you can. But the other thing that you can do is you can either change where you put the base stamp, but you can only pick like one base stamp for all of them. And if let's say you've got tens of thousands of documents that you're sending, you're not going to have time to individually visualize each one and move the base stamps around before you produce it.
That's just going to take way too long. It's probably not that time efficient, especially if... You're always going to have an original un-bait stamped copy.
And if something turns out to be a smoking gun in the trial and you need that one and you need the bait stamp moved, you can always do that again later. But for the purposes of just getting something out, I would say just put the bait stamp on there and send it out that way. But there might be a time where you specifically don't want any of the text to ever or maybe the images to ever get obscured by a bait stamp.
And so certainly like real estate documents, contracts, other form documents like that. they really go to all the margins because they want to get everything on a single sheet of paper. Those are a situation where you might need to do something else. And I've got another PDF here that I've set up for just that purpose.
I've taken a whole bunch of photos. You might have a whole bunch of photos that get exchanged in discovery and I compile them into a PDF. Here's a whole bunch of pictures that I took of the Daily Center, which is a state courthouse here in Chicago. And it's a five page PDF. If I try to bait stamp this, I'll hit enhance scans.
bait numbering and i'll add it what will happen is um i can try and put the bait stamp down here no matter what i do i mean i guess i can make it like size 14 font make it bold or underline and make the color like a good like a really bold color that stands out but people are still going to have a hard time seeing it right so even if you make this aerial bold right that's a really hard um bait stamp to see and so for this because they're photos it's a lot bigger they ain't half by 11. you're gonna have to get a little bit big just so you can see what's going on but let's do that let's set it to like 72 so make sure we can see those numbers and then we'll move it up on the margin so we can see that as well and so then we'll put in four digits again and add that gtc prefix and let's say i already bait stamped that last user manual. So let's start this one right after that. So if we look, I don't remember what number we ended on, but it was less than a thousand pages. So let's start this one at 1,001. So we could do that.
Now we've got a bait stamp down here, GTC 1,001. Let's hit okay to make it happen. So I've got those. And if we go down through all the pages, you could see there's that bait stamp.
But sometimes even then it's still hard to see, even though I've made it really big and it's blocking a lot of not crucial information, but. information that I wish it weren't blocking. So what do we do about that? We can remove the bait stamp.
So that's something that you can do. So that's a very quick done that. Now let's go back to page one and we'll add the bait stamps again. And this time we'll do something a little bit different. So when we come up to here, we'll leave the font relatively big because we're dealing with photos that are not eight and a half by 11, but they're regular, their photo resolution size.
So it's much bigger than eight and a half by 11. So we'll just make it 14 for now and I'm gonna leave it black and I'll put it in the lower right hand side and do the same thing that I like to do four digits and the prefix and again, we'll start at 1001 just To show you could pick any number I can make it very precise. I can make it the exact number after that Manual ended like 200 something or I could just pick any arbitrary number that I want. I'm gonna hit OK But the other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to these appearance options and click on this shrink document to avoid overwriting the document's text and graphics.
When I hit OK and hit OK here, what it has done is instead of the image going to all four corners of this document, of this PDF image, it's now created a white border around it, and it puts that bait stamp in that lower right-hand corner in that border. So no matter which photo I'm looking at, that bait stamp is going to be in a spot that's not covered by any of the image or made difficult to see by any of the image. and it's not covering anything that I might wanna see. So a lot of people do that.
I don't think it's ideal cause then it starts injecting margins and shrinking stuff. And I just like to have as big an image as possible. But for things like photos, you might wanna use this feature. Or if you have text that goes all the way to the edges of your document, then that's something that you might wanna do. So if you have any questions on bait stamping, feel free to leave them in the comments.
I'd love to talk to you guys down there. Thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one.