A Lawyer's Guide to Tenthlining Court Documents in Kenya

If you're an advocate, tenthlining probably isn't something you think about until the Judiciary of Kenya E-Filing System rejects a document your firm just spent a week preparing. By then it's not a formatting question anymore, it's a deadline problem.

This guide is written for advocates, not for the clerk or paralegal doing the actual formatting. It covers which documents need tenthlining, when in a matter's lifecycle to apply it, who in your firm should own the process, and the mistakes that tend to originate at the advocate's desk rather than the support staff's.

If you're still unclear on what tenthlining actually is or which practice directions require it, start with What Is Tenthlining and Why Kenyan Courts Require It. This piece assumes you already know that and want to know how to run it as a firm process.

Which documents actually need tenthlining

Not everything you file needs margin line numbers. As a working rule, if a document is meant to be read, cited, and referred to by paragraph or line in open court or in a ruling, it needs tenthlining. That covers:

• Plaints and petitions
• Defences and replies
• Affidavits (supporting, replying, and further affidavits)
• Written submissions
• Applications and supporting grounds
• Notices of motion
• Grounds of appeal and records of appeal

It generally does not cover cover letters, certificates of urgency, statements of account attached purely as annexures, or exhibits that are reproduced documents rather than drafted argument. If you're unsure whether a specific annexure needs it, the safer default is to check the relevant court's practice directions rather than guess, since the requirement is set out per court, not as one blanket rule.

When in the matter to apply it, not after

The mistake most advocates make isn't formatting the wrong document, it's formatting at the wrong time. Tenthlining should happen once, right before upload to the e-filing system, on the final version of the document. Every version before that is still a working draft, and running line numbers on a working draft is wasted effort, because any edit that adds or removes a line shifts everything below it.

In practice that means:

1. Draft and revise the document as normal, with no line numbers.
2. Get final sign-off from the instructing advocate.
3. Convert to PDF and tenthline the final PDF, not the Word file.
4. Upload the tenthlined PDF to the e-filing system.

If a document gets amended after tenthlining, for example, after a judge directs an amendment at a mention, it needs to be re-tenthlined before re-filing. Re-filing an amended document with the old, now-misaligned line numbers is one of the more common causes of e-filing system rejection, because the line numbers on the face of the document no longer match what a re-numbering pass would produce.

Who should own tenthlining in your firm

In most firms this ends up being whoever happens to hit "export to PDF" last, which means it's inconsistent by default: sometimes the clerk does it, sometimes the pupil does it, sometimes an associate does it at 11 pm before a filing deadline. That inconsistency is exactly how formatting errors slip through.

The better model is to make tenthlining a fixed step in your firm's filing checklist, owned by whoever finalizes documents for filing, rather than an ad hoc task someone remembers (or doesn't) under deadline pressure. For a sole practitioner, that might be you. For a firm with litigation support staff, it should be a named role, not "whoever's free."

This matters more once you have multiple advocates filing under one firm. Tenthliner's team accounts let a firm share a pool of credits across everyone processing documents, so a managing partner can see usage across the firm instead of each advocate running personal accounts with no visibility into how consistently the firm's own process is actually being followed.

A pre-filing checklist

Before uploading to the e-filing system:

• [ ] Is this the final, signed-off version of the document?
• [ ] Has it been converted to PDF, not left as an editable Word file?
• [ ] Does the tenthlining match the receiving court's format (font, line color, page number position), not just any format?
• [ ] If the document was amended after a previous tenthlining pass, has it been re-tenthlined?
• [ ] Does the line numbering run cleanly from the first page to the last, with no gaps introduced by a scanned annexure or an image page?

How to Tenthline a Legal Document in Under 5 Minutes walks through the actual mechanics of getting from a Word draft to a correctly tenthlined PDF, if your firm hasn't settled on a process yet.

Mistakes that trace back to the advocate, not the clerk

A few patterns show up repeatedly, and they usually start above the clerk's desk:

• Signing off on a document, then editing it after. If you approve a draft, someone tenthlines it, and you then ask for "one small change," that change needs to go through tenthlining again. Treat sign-off as the point the document becomes final, not a formality before more edits.
• Assuming every court wants the same format. The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and each High Court registry don't necessarily specify identical margins, fonts, or line colors. A format that was accepted at Milimani doesn't guarantee acceptance at a different registry.
• Delegating without a checklist. Telling a pupil or clerk to "just tenthline it" without a defined process means the outcome depends on what they happen to remember that day. A written checklist removes that variance.
• Not budgeting time for a second pass. If the e-filing system rejects a document over formatting, that's not a five-minute fix squeezed between a mention and a client call. Build in the time, or build in the process that prevents the rejection in the first place.

The actual cost of getting this wrong

A rejected filing on the e-filing system doesn't just cost you the time to reformat and re-upload. If the rejection happens close to a filing deadline, it can mean the difference between filing on time and filing late, with all the consequences that follow for your client's matter. Treating tenthlining as a fixed, owned step in your firm's process, rather than a last-minute task, is cheaper than treating it as a fire to put out.

Try Tenthliner free: 50 credits, no card required, enough to see whether it fits into your firm's filing process before you commit to it.