Kerala High Court Introduces Continuous Page Numbering Feature For Easy Reference Of Court Documents

The Kerala High Court has introduced a continuous page numbering feature for case documents in the e-filing portal for the purposes of simplifying the process of referencing and navigating through case documents in Courts. 

The move comes in the wake of CJI Chandrachud's announcement of steps to solve the issue of non-tallying of pagination of copies that often occurs during the pleadings. The CJI, on taking note of the inconvenience faced by the bench in tracing and matching the page numbers which the advocates refer to while submitting their arguments, remarked, "I have always found that members of the bar and the bench aren't on the same page with regards to the paginated soft copies of PDFs”.

Continuous page numbering feature has thus been resolved to be adopted by the Kerala High Court in a bid to ensure that all subsequent petitions and documents filed in the case file have continuous page numbers and to enable Advocates before appearing in Court to update page numbers in their physical copy of case bundle, in accordance with the 'View Case Bundle' in 'My Case' tab in the Advocate Dashboard in the e-filing portal. 

It may be noted that in a previous circular issued on August 22, 2023, the Supreme Court provided detailed comperehensive guidelines to streamline the process of filing written submissions and compilations before the constitution benches and other important final hearing matters.

The guidelines as mentioned in a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) also provided instructions on Pagination and PDF bookmarking. It stated :

" v. Pagination: The running pages and PDF pages must be the same; and vi. The PDF must be bookmarked;”

Click Here To Read/Download The Notice