Preparing manual PDF electronic bundles

Produced in partnership with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan UK LLP

Last updated on 10/08/2022

The following Dispute Resolution practice note produced in partnership with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan UK LLP provides comprehensive and up to date legal information covering:

Preparing manual PDF electronic bundles
How to prepare PDF bundles—five basic steps
Tools
Word processor
PDF software programmes
Scanners
Step 1—converting submissions and other text documents directly to PDF
Word
The Adobe Acrobat ribbon in Word
Step 2—converting appendix materials to PDF

More...

Do not scan appendix materials unless you have to
Download authorities as PDFs
Step 3—combine all of the documents you want in you bundle into a single PDF file
Step 4—make any scanned materials searchable using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software
Step 5—create bookmarks for any documents contained in the appendix
What is a bookmark?
Automatically generating bookmarks using Adobe Acrobat
Generating bookmarks based on Word’s paragraph styles
Manually adding bookmarks
Editing bookmarks
Moving bookmarks
Nesting bookmarks
Adding headers, footers and page numbers to a PDF

This Practice Note provides guidance on preparing manual PDF bundles, similar to those required by Practice Direction 51O, the Protocol and Supreme Court Practice Direction 14. The process for uploading documents to specialised trial management software may be different. It should be read in conjunction with Practice Note: Electronic bundles in civil proceedings.

With the kind permission of Blake Hawthorne, his ‘Guide to Creating Electronic Appellate Briefs, Blake A. Hawthorne, Supreme Court of Texas’ dated 1 January 2019, has been used as a starting point for this guidance on preparing manual electronic bundles for use in proceedings in England and Wales.

How to prepare PDF bundles—five basic steps

There are five basic steps to create an electronic bundle which will be as effective and easy to use as possible:

•
Convert your submissions from the original word processing document, eg Microsoft Word, directly to PDF. Unless it is unavoidable, do not scan a document to create a PDF
•
Convert any exhibits to PDF. Do not scan exhibits that are available in electronic format, such as judgments, authorities or orders
•
Combine the submission and any exhibits together into one PDF file
•
Make any scanned materials searchable using optical character recognition (OCR) software like Adobe Acrobat
•
Create bookmarks for any documents contained in the exhibit

Tools

Word processor

The primary tool for creating an electronic bundle is a word processor.

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