I’m really puzzled by this one. I find a lot of government or court documents that have something like “NYDOCS03/735441.5” at the bottom of each page. They always start with NYDOCS03; the numbers that follow vary.
Because of the “NY,” I though it referred to something in New York, but I find it on documents from Oregon, Alaska and the federal government, too.
If you Google “NYDOCS03” you’ll get 265 hits, including a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, an Oregon voter information document, and some Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
My WAG is that it’s just a document identification number assigned by database management software.
NYDOCS can mean “New York Department of Correctional Services.” Could that department or a database that it maintains be involved in all those cases around the country?
I bet it is assigned by the New York State Document Classification System. Like a NY equivelent of the SuDoc classification scheme for federal documents.
Right. That’s a file name. It’s my guess that it’s a document code file name used by Shearman & Sterling, because the majority of the documents on Google with the code come overtly from them.
It’s a document identifier. Every law firm (at least of any size) does this.
I’m the word processing manager of a large law firm. Every document we produce has a number like that. In our case, it’s in the format xxxxxx.xxxxx/xxxxxxx.x, with the first group of digits being the client number (i.e., a unique number assigned to the client for whom the legal work is being done), the second group being a matter number (most clients of a corporate law firm will have more than one matter being handled at the firm), the third group of digits being a unique number assigned to that document, and the final digit being the version number of that document (a document may go through numerous revisions, each being assigned a version number).
Without these numbers it would be pretty much impossible to keep track of work.
Oh, one more thing. In the example given in the OP, “NYDOCS03” probably identifies the file server on which the document lives. We don’t do that at this firm, since nobody really needs that information to find a document.
It is entirely possible that other firms use a similar identifying system. “NYDOCS03” probably identifies the document server. New York office, server no. 3. There are any number of firms with multiple offices and servers.
Not saying the documents the OP is looking at don’t come from Shearman & Sterling, just that, without looking at the actual documents, the number isn’t absolute proof that they do.