Use a text editor to extract a list of Bates numbers from a pleading, expert report, etc.
If you've ever been asked to pull all documents cited in interrogatory responses or listed in the footnote of an expert report, you can use a text editor (I use UltraEdit, but TextPad and Notepad++ have similar capabilities) to help you quickly generate a Bates number list. You will be able to clean up your Bates list and plug it into your review platform for searching.
- Make sure your document is fully text-searchable, if it's a PDF you may need to OCR it.
- Take a quick look through the document to make a note of Bates prefixes (if you're already at the expert report stage you're probably familiar with them).
- Copy all of the text of your document and paste into UltraEdit. Make sure you've grabbed any footnotes.
- In UltraEdit, replace each Bates prefix with a line break (^p) and the Bates prefix. For example, replace ILTA with ^pILTA and ALA with ^pALA. This will put all the Bates numbers at the front of a line.
- Sort your document. All of the ILTA docs will be together, all of the ALA docs will be together etc. If you have the Remove Duplicates option checked that will also help clean up your list.
- Turn on column mode so you can select only the first part of the lines with your Bates number. Select your Bates sections.
- Copy and paste your sets of Bates numbers into a new document. You will be able to quickly identify which docs are missing a zero, have an extra digit, etc.
- Use your cleaned up Bates number list to search in your review platform.
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