Summary
All documents on the platform will need to be paginated with a unique identifier in order for them to be quickly referenced by Counsel at the hearing and for the purposes of hyperlinking.
Whilst we can generally adopt your preferred approach, we've set our best practice guidance to ensure referencing and bundle preparation is as efficient as possible, allowing users to maximise the benefits of an electronic bundle on our platform.
Our best practice advice follows Court guidance on referencing and originates from Opus' previous experience, having been accepted by judges and arbitrators in 1,000+ hearings.
Considerations
For small PDF bundles or in a hard copy world, the absence of numeric tabs dividing individual documents requires the page number to run sequentially through each bundle to ensure the pagination is unique and can be accurately referenced at the hearing. However, by using an integrated electronic solution such as Opus 2 Hearings, the need for individual pages to be numbered sequentially through the bundle falls away as the platform accommodates numeric tabs, providing a more simple unique pagination value.
Our standard and recommended approach is to format pagination as Bundle/Tab/Page, and all documents are paginated internally (each document starting at page 1). The pagination stamp is generated from the metadata applied to the documents and is automatically applied to the bottom right of each page upon upload - the parties do not need to paginate documents in advance of upload.
Unique pagination at a page level is therefore not necessary when you have a unique tab reference running sequentially. For example, bundle C, tab 70, page 207 would become bundle C, tab 7, page 1.
If you do wish to have sequentially paginated pages as well as sequentially paginated tabs, we advise the page numbering restarts from page 1 again in all new bundles/subfolders, as the tab numbers would.
There are several reasons why internal pagination is our recommended approach:
- Referencing - Sequential pagination can become unwieldy for Counsel to reference during the hearing. It is quicker to locate and display documents by using the tab number, which is particularly useful during the hearing and paginating in this way could mean the difference between calling “bundle H, tab 45, page 2” or “bundle H, tab 45, page 1,751”.
- Inserts
- Inserts into sequentially paginated bundles are more time consuming to action – load files would need to indicate the sequential page numbering to be applied to each document, which is not required when page numbering starts from 1 in each document.
- Inserts into sequentially paginated bundles can become extremely difficult to manage in terms of format (e.g. “.1”, “.01”, “.001”). For this reason, if parties wish to use sequential pagination they must provide the bundle, tab and page reference needed for each inserted document, as opposed to just the bundle and tab information.
- The time taken for us to apply sequential pagination for the purposes of matching a pre-existing hardcopy would be billable at standard content management rates.
- Our working estimates do not include the addition of sequentially paginated pages, only sequentially paginated tabs, and so our turnaround times are likely to increase, which is particularly important to be aware of when the matter is sitting.
- Exports - By design, documents export in Bundle_Tab format not Bundle_Tab_Page so if the pagination is the only unique reference this will need to be manually amended after export.
If you would like to understand how pagination works in more detail, your Solution Operations Manager would be happy to discuss this with you.