Hintyr preserves document family relationships during Bates numbering. Parents are always numbered before their children, and emails receive numbers before their attachments. This keeps family groups in contiguous ranges within the Bates sequence.
What document families are
A document family consists of a parent document and its associated child documents. The most common example in legal review is an email message (parent) and its file attachments (children). Other examples include compound documents with embedded objects, archive files containing extracted contents, and presentations with linked media.
Keeping family integrity matters because it lets counsel identify a complete family by looking at contiguous Bates ranges. If an email is ABC000010 and its three attachments are ABC000011 through ABC000013, the relationship is immediately clear from the numbering sequence.
How family ordering works
When Hintyr applies Bates numbers to files that include document families, it follows a specific ordering protocol. The parent is always numbered first. Children follow immediately, before moving on to the next family or standalone document in the set.
Within a family, children are ordered by filename. For email attachments, this means they appear alphabetically after the email itself. This deterministic ordering ensures the same set of files always produces the same Bates sequence, which matters for reproducibility and audit compliance.
Email and attachment ordering
Email families follow a specific pattern. The email gets the first number in the family sequence. Attachments follow immediately in alphabetical order by filename. If an email has three attachments ("Budget.xlsx", "Agenda.pdf", and "Notes.docx"), they're numbered as Agenda.pdf, Budget.xlsx, Notes.docx (alphabetical), right after the email.
In page mode, the email may use multiple Bates numbers (one per page of the rendered email), and each attachment also gets numbers for all its pages. The entire family forms a single contiguous block in the sequence before the next family or document begins.
Sorting families
When a single numbering operation includes multiple families, they're sorted alphabetically by parent filename. A family with parent "Contract_A.pdf" gets numbers before one with "Contract_B.pdf". Standalone documents (those without children) sort by filename and interleave with families in alphabetical order.
This predictable sort order means the same numbering operation on the same files always produces the same result. Paralegals and production managers can rely on this consistency when preparing production logs, privilege log cross-references, and Bates range summaries.
Compound documents
The same ordering rules apply to compound documents beyond emails. If a document contains embedded files (for example, a spreadsheet inside a presentation), the container is numbered first and the embedded files follow. All parent-child relationships are reflected in the Bates sequence regardless of document type.