Every shop on the first page of search results for this is a franchise copy center. They can put toner on paper. They cannot tell you why the Bates number landed on top of the signature block.
Blowback is printing a production back to paper from the images — the opposite direction from scanning, and the step that still happens before a deposition, a hearing binder or a document-intensive witness prep session.
It looks like a print job. It is not one, and the difference shows up in the places a copy center has no reason to look.
What a print shop gets wrong
- The endorsement. Court production protocols place the Bates number and the confidentiality legend at specified corners and require that they not obscure the underlying document. A protocol in the AFFF products liability MDL in the District of South Carolina requires each page branded in the bottom right with a Bates number and the confidentiality designation in the bottom left, with the number burned on at a location that does not obliterate, conceal, or interfere with any information from the source document. Scale a page to fit letter stock and you can push an endorsement into the text it was placed to avoid.
- The same protocol directs that original document orientation be maintained — portrait to portrait, landscape to landscape — and that the Bates number sit outside the content area. Auto-rotate on a production printer does not know that.
- Set integrity. A production is a numbered sequence. A reprint that silently drops a slip-sheeted native placeholder, or collates a family out of order, produces a binder that does not match the record anyone else is working from.
- Designated material going to an unvetted retail counter is a problem whether or not anything goes wrong, because you cannot describe the handling if you are asked to.
What we actually do with it
We print from the production images and the load file together, so the paper set carries the same numbering, the same endorsements and the same family structure as the electronic set. Slip sheets stay where the natives were. Color pages print in color where the protocol calls for color. Nothing is scaled without being told to.
And because the images and the load file are already here, a blowback is a step in a workflow rather than a handoff to a vendor who has never seen the matter.
The usual jobs
- Hearing and trial binders built to a volume or an exhibit list, tabbed and indexed
- Deposition sets — one working copy, one clean copy, one for the record
- Witness prep sets limited to a custodian or a date range
- Chambers copies where a judge wants paper
- Full war room reprints when a case moves
The honest version of the pitch
A franchise copy center is cheaper per page. For a hundred pages of something nobody will scrutinize, use one.
For a production set that has to match the record, the per-page price is not the number that matters, and a reprint that has to be redone is more expensive than getting it right once.
What we do
Pro-Legal Services, Inc. runs blowback printing for litigation teams from Arlington, Virginia — printing from production images and load files, preserving endorsements, orientation and family structure, building binders to an exhibit list, and handling designated material under the protective order rather than at a retail counter.
Scanning, coding and production run in the same building, so paper and electronic sets stay in agreement.
Related: litigation copying and blowback services, document scanning services Arlington VA, exhibit indexing services, hearing exhibit production, Bates numbering service, paper to ESI conversion, large format demonstrative boards.
Pro-Legal Services, Inc. prints and builds production sets from Arlington, Virginia, serving counsel in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, with courier delivery across the region.
Need a production set back on paper before a deposition? Send the volume and the date you need it. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com