Typically, we will need to have a full series of statements for each of the parties’ asset and loan accounts for a particular period of time. Asset accounts include statements for 401K plans, regular bank accounts, money market accounts, brokerage accounts, and so on. The main kinds of loan accounts we see are credit cards, mortgages, and home equity lines of credit.
Once we get the statements, we apply Bates numbers to them. We prefer that all of the statements for each account be together in date order. Grouping all of the statements for a particular account together enables us to quickly click through them to see what the activity for that account included.
What often happens is people will organize their documents by putting the statements for all of their accounts issued in a particular month together so that January Chase account statement is followed by the January American Express statement which is then followed by the Bank of America statement and so on.
This makes more work for us and costs the client more. If you read the explanation of Bates numbering, you will see that we prepare an index to the documents. The index is intended to allow us to quickly look up the page number for key documents.
If we have one continuous series of statements for each account, then we only need to make one entry in the index for that account. We note the starting number and the ending number, and our index for that account is complete. As long as the statements are in chronological order, it is very easy to search through them to find the record of a particular transaction that we need to prove.
If the statements for different accounts are grouped together, we have to make an index entry for every month and it takes much longer to find things.
