Comparison
BatesFlow vs. Adobe Acrobat for discovery production.
Acrobat is a great PDF editor. It is not discovery production software. If your paralegal is opening Acrobat to prepare a matrimonial production, here's what you're still doing by hand — and what BatesFlow does automatically.
| Capability | Adobe Acrobat | BatesFlow |
|---|---|---|
| Bates stamp individual pages | Yes — manual, one document at a time | Yes — every page, every document, automatic |
| Parse a Demand for Discovery & Inspection | No | Yes — extracts each numbered request, editable |
| OCR scanned client documents | Basic OCR, no classification | Claude Vision OCR + classifies each doc by request |
| Map documents to demand requests | No | AI-suggested mapping; paralegal confirms |
| Generate the Rider DOCX | No — typed by hand in Word | Yes — court-ready, NY matrimonial format |
| Generate the Bates Index XLSX | No | Yes — auto-produced with every production |
| Case-level Bates continuity | Manual spreadsheet tracking | Single source of truth per case |
| Multi-tenant privilege boundary | N/A — single user | Firm-level isolation; operator can't see case data |
| Time per 800-document production | 6–8 hours of paralegal time | ~15 minutes |
The honest version
Acrobat does one job well: it stamps a page. Everything else that goes into a NY matrimonial discovery response — parsing the demand, OCR-ing scanned bank statements, deciding which document answers which request, writing the Rider, assembling the Bates Index — still lives in your paralegal's head or a spreadsheet. BatesFlow absorbs all of it. You keep Acrobat for what it's good at; you stop using it as a production tool.