Do it now
Free for up to 20 files and 60 pages, every feature enabled. The PDFs are opened and written in the browser; nothing is uploaded, and you can pull the network cable and watch the batch still finish.
Open the tool. The legend layer is already on, pre-filled with CONFIDENTIAL — SUBJECT TO PROTECTIVE ORDER, and numbering is off.
Drag in the batch. Dozens of files at once is the normal case, not the edge case.
Replace the legend text with the wording your order actually requires, and set the corner, the inset and the size.
Run it. Every page of every file is stamped, and each output is re-opened and checked before it is written.
How it actually works
Use the wording of your order, not a preset
The legend field is free text because the required wording is not standard. CONFIDENTIAL, HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEYS’ EYES ONLY, CONFIDENTIAL — SUBJECT TO PROTECTIVE ORDER, and a designation naming the case are all in normal use, and the one that protects you is the one your protective order specifies. The default text is a starting point to be replaced, not a recommendation.
The standard PDF fonts encode Latin text only. If you paste a character outside that set the panel tells you which character before the run, rather than letting sixty files fail one at a time.
Every page, because a designation on page one protects page one
The legend defaults to every page of every file. A stamp on the cover page of a forty-page memorandum does not travel with page thirty-one after somebody prints a section, and a page that circulates without its designation is the argument you do not want to have. You can still restrict it to the first page or to a page range — 1-5, 12, 40- — when the batch calls for it.
Placement that survives a mixed batch
A real batch is not uniform: some files are born-digital Letter pages, some are scans with a tight crop box, some pages carry a rotation of 90 or 270 from the scanner’s feed. Each page is measured on its own, so the legend lands where the reader looks rather than at a coordinate that happens to be the lower right of an unrotated page. An opaque backing box behind the text keeps it off body copy, and a warning fires before the run if the legend would sit within a quarter inch of the trim edge.
The legend is searchable, and so is the proof it landed
The stamp is a text object, so it can be found with Ctrl+F and indexed by a review platform — which is how the receiving side confirms the designation is there at all. With verification on, each stamped file is re-opened after the stamp and the legend text is looked for on the pages that were supposed to receive it. A file that will not re-open is reported as a failure and never delivered; a page missing its legend is a warning you can chase before the batch goes out.
What else the same batch should get before it goes out
A confidentiality stamp is a label, not protection. Two read-only checks run over the same files, on the same machine: a metadata pass that finds the author name, the original file path and the revision history still sitting in the PDF, and a redaction pass that finds black bars with extractable text underneath. Both are the ordinary way confidential material leaks out of a document that was correctly stamped.
If the batch is a production rather than an internal circulation, turn the numbering layer on in the same run and you get one continuous Bates sequence across the set, a manifest CSV with a SHA-256 per document, and load files a review platform reads.
Open the tool
Free for up to 20 files and 60 pages, with every feature enabled. $19 once for unlimited.