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Partner, 8-person Law Firm · Berlin, Germany
“We process 200+ pages of discovery per case. Bates labeling used to take a paralegal 2 hours per case in Acrobat. With Konomic it's 5 minutes. Multiply by 30 cases a year — that's a full week of billable hours we've recovered.”
Marcus runs a small commercial litigation firm in Berlin with 8 people: 3 partners, 3 associates, and 2 paralegals. They handle around 30 cases per year — mostly contract disputes, employment cases, and small commercial fraud claims. Each case generates 100-500 pages of discovery documents.
For Bates labeling — the sequential numbering system that legal teams use to uniquely identify every page in a production — they used Adobe Acrobat Pro. The process worked, but it was painful. A paralegal would open each PDF in Acrobat, configure the Bates settings, run the tool, verify the output, and re-export. About 2 hours per case, multiplied by 30 cases per year — 60 hours of pure busywork.
On top of that: Acrobat Pro at €19,99/month per seat × 8 people = €1,920/year. And the paralegal time is billable to the firm at €40/hour internally — €2,400 in opportunity cost on top of the software fees.
Marcus found Konomic through a comparison post about Adobe alternatives. He was skeptical — most online PDF tools don't handle real legal workflows like Bates numbering or proper redaction. He tested it on a low-stakes archive case first.
The Page Numbers tool with Bates mode handled their exact format — "CASE-2026-XXXX" with 4-digit zero-padded counters. The flatten step locked the numbers permanently. The whole process took 5 minutes for a 250-page production. Marcus called the entire team in to demonstrate.
German civil litigation isn't as document-heavy as US discovery, but commercial cases still generate 100-500 pages of evidence. Each page needs a unique identifier that follows it through the case — depositions reference "exhibit CASE-2026-0234," briefs cite "page CASE-2026-0451," the judge wants every page numbered in a way that can't be ambiguous.
Adobe Acrobat handles this fine. The problem was just the time and friction. Each production was a 30-minute setup + 90 minutes of actually running the tool, exporting, verifying, fixing mistakes, re-exporting. Two hours of high-paid paralegal time for what should be a 30-second task.
Marcus migrated his team in stages. Week 1: tested on one closed case's archive copy. Week 2: ran Konomic in parallel with Acrobat on three live cases. Week 3: switched all new productions to Konomic. Week 4: canceled Adobe Acrobat seats.
One paralegal needed convincing — she'd been using Acrobat for 8 years and knew every keyboard shortcut. After her first Konomic Bates run finished in under 5 minutes (vs her previous best of 47 minutes in Acrobat), she became the strongest internal advocate.
Konomic ended up replacing more than just Bates numbering:
"The legal tech market is dominated by overpriced suites that small firms can't afford. Konomic isn't a complete legal practice management system — it's a focused PDF tool that does the document operations we actually need. For a small firm, that's exactly the right scope."
"The Bates labeling alone pays for the subscription 100x over. Everything else is bonus."
Some details anonymized to protect customer privacy. Quotes used with permission.