How a court bundle is put together, section by section
A bundle is one document, not a folder of documents. It normally opens with a front sheet naming the case, then an index listing every document with the page it starts on, then the documents themselves grouped into sections and arranged in date order inside each section, with page numbers running continuously from the first page to the last and bookmarks down the side of the PDF. The contents and the order are set by whatever direction you were given in your own case, and those differ by country, by court and by case type. What follows is the shape most bundles take and the formatting that gets them sent back, which is the part nobody tells you until it happens.
Read the direction first, then read this
If you have been given a direction, an order or a set of instructions that says what your bundle should contain, that document beats every general guide including this one.
What you are looking for in it: how many sections, what goes in each, whether it must be electronic or on paper or both, how many copies, what the file must be called, the page limit if there is one, and the date it has to be filed by. Those seven things determine everything you do next.
If you do not have one and you do not know whether you were meant to, ask the court office or whoever is advising you. I am not a lawyer and this site cannot tell you what your case needs.
The front sheet
One page, plain, at the very front. It usually carries the name of the court, the case or claim number, the names of the parties as they appear on the other case documents, what this bundle is, who prepared it, and the date it was prepared.
If there is more than one volume, say which volume this is and how many there are, and say which page numbers this volume covers. Someone holding volume two needs to know that without opening anything else.
Keep it dull. A cover page with a logo on it looks like a pitch deck and reads badly in a room where everything else is black text on white paper.
The index, which is the part people get wrong
The index is a table. One row per document, and each row gives a short description of the document, its date, and the page number where it starts in this bundle.
The page number is the whole point, and it has to be the page number in the finished bundle, not the page number the document had on its own. That means the index can only be written after the bundle is assembled and paginated, which is why people who write the index first end up rewriting it.
In an electronic bundle you would normally also want each index entry to be a link to the document it names. The England and Wales judiciary's general guidance on electronic court bundles, published in November 2021, puts it directly: each entry in the index must be hyperlinked to the indexed document. That is one jurisdiction's written rule, quoted because it is public and specific. Check what yours asks for.
The usual running order
Most bundles are grouped into sections, and while the section names differ, the sequence tends to run from the formal documents to the evidence:
- The documents that define the case: the claim, application or response, and anything the parties have filed setting out their positions.
- Orders and directions already made.
- Witness statements, each with its own exhibits if it has them.
- The documents themselves, usually in date order, oldest first.
- Expert reports, if there are any.
Inside each section, chronological beats every other arrangement. A reader who knows a section runs from oldest to newest can find any date by feel. A reader working through a section sorted by document type, or by which pile it came out of, cannot.
Some courts reverse that and want the most recent first, and some case types have their own fixed sections. Follow yours if it says something different.
Pagination is the single biggest cause of a bundle being rejected
Numbers must run continuously from page 1 of the bundle to the last page, and they must not restart at each document. If page 47 is called page 47 in exactly one place, the bundle works, because everyone in the room can be told to turn to 47 and arrive at the same page.
Two more things that follow from that, both from the same published guidance:
- Numbers should be computer generated rather than written on by hand.
- In an electronic bundle, the number printed on the page should match the PDF's own page count, so that typing 47 into the reader's page box lands on the page labelled 47. That means no unnumbered cover sheets quietly shifting everything by one.
If your bundle runs to a second volume, continue the numbering rather than starting over. Volume two starting at page 1 is how you end up with two page 47s and an argument.
Scans, OCR and file size
A scanned page is a photograph of text. Nothing can search it, highlight it or copy from it until it has been through OCR, and the same published guidance asks for OCR on any page of typed text that was not created digitally in the first place. If you are scanning years of letters, this is the step to do before assembly, not after.
The same guidance suggests keeping scan resolution at or below 300 dpi, because higher settings produce a file so heavy it stutters when someone scrolls it, and asks that bundles be named with the case reference and an abbreviated case name so the file is identifiable when it is sitting in someone's inbox next to nine others.
On size, it notes that emails to justice.gov.uk addresses cannot exceed 36 MB in total. Wherever you are filing, find out the ceiling before you spend an afternoon building something that will not send.
What usually does not go in
Duplicates, first. The same email appearing in three sections because it was in three different piles makes the bundle longer and the index wrong, and the reader has no way to know they are the same document.
Documents nobody has seen before, second. A bundle is normally an assembly of material that has already been disclosed or filed, not a place to introduce something new.
Beyond that, there are categories of correspondence and material that courts commonly direct should be left out, and the rules on them vary by jurisdiction and by case. If you are unsure whether a particular document belongs, that is a question for a lawyer, and a genuinely important one. Nothing on this site can answer it for you.
Doing it without paying for software
The free route is real and it is fiddly. You can merge PDFs with any number of free tools. You can scan and convert with free software. Where free tends to run out is the step in the middle: stamping one continuous page number across a merged file of several hundred pages, and producing real PDF bookmarks rather than a page of links.
If you have Acrobat, it does all of this and you should use it. If you have Word and everything is already a digital document, you can paste it all into one file, number the pages in the footer and export a PDF, which works fine and falls apart the moment there are scans and photos in the mix.
What tends to eat the evening is not any single step. It is redoing the index after you insert one more document at page 60 and every page number after it moves.
Upload your PDFs and photos in the order you want them and it produces one bundle with a cover, an index showing the page each document starts on, continuous numbering and real PDF bookmarks, though it does not run OCR, so scans need that doing first.
Open Court bundle →