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Citing to Bates Labels and Other Citation Formats
Citing to Bates Labels and Other Citation Formats

How to customize formats for fact citations.

Meg Hall avatar
Written by Meg Hall
Updated over a week ago

Bates labels are often used to identify documents that are exchanged during discovery. Even if you are not using Bates labels, it is worth reading this section, because CaseFleet can help you with whatever method you are using for identifying pages and documents.

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NOTE: When you upload documents using the Processed Bulk-Uploads Add-On feature, bates labels or other citation formats from the matching load file will be automatically mapped over.

Editing Source Citation Formats

When you upload a document as a source on the Sources tab, CaseFleet will apply a default citation format based on the number of pages in the document. For example, if you create a citation on the first page of the document, the citation will appear as "<Document Name> at 1". You can modify this citation format in three ways:

  1. First, you can change the starting page number. If you set the start page number to 1000, then a citation on page 1 of the document will appear as "at 1000", a citation to page 2 will appear as "at 1001", and so on.

  2. Second, you can add a prefix to the citation. This is very common when documents are Bates labeled. Page 1 may be stamped as "DEF00001". In that case, the prefix is "DEF". (We'll talk about what to do with all those zeroes next.)

  3. Third, you can set the number of digits for the numeric part of the citation. To determine this amount, ignore the prefix and count the number of digits used to write the number. For example, if a page is stamped "PL-0000127", the number portion has 7 digits. A stamp such as "DEF-CONF:00012" has 5 digits.

Citation formats are set on the Edit form for a source. You can open the Edit form from either the Sources tab (click the pencil icon for the source) or from within the Document Reviewer (click the "Edit Source" button in the menu bar).  

Here's an example of how to add Bates labels from the Sources tab:

When you update the citation fields, the form will generate a preview of what a citation will look like. Even if you don't have Bates-labelled documents, it is still worthwhile to set the start page number if the document does not start at page 1.

After setting the citation format, the citations to facts that you create in the Document Reviewer will be automatically formatted to match the scheme of the underlying source document.

NOTE: Changes to the citation formatting / Bates information will only be reflected in future citations created for the source. Any citations created prior to editing the citation details will retain their formatting unless updated manually.

Filtering by Beginning Bates

Using the "Beginning Bates" field filter option, you can quickly narrow your entire sources list to a subset of documents matching your specifications based on the starting bates number for the source. You can filter by the Beginning Bates using the contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, or is exactly options:

Viewing Bates Label Information

Once you've added the Bates information for a document, you can add these details to your view on the Sources tab.

Using the column selector, choose the column options you want to be included in your view. The following columns provide Bates/citation labeling information:

  1. Beg. Bates: The starting Bates number for the document, based on your citation format settings.

  2. Pages: The total number of pages in the document.

  3. Bates Range: The beginning and ending Bates numbers for a particular document.

To quickly refer to this information later, be sure to save your selection as a Saved View.

You can also view Citation Formatting information, including the full Bates range of a document, on the Source Detail page, which can be found by clicking on the name of the document in your Sources list.

For more information on exporting Bates information for your Source list, click here.

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