What Is Tenth Lining? Court Document Line Numbering Explained

Tenth lining (also written tenth-lining, tenthlining or tenth line numbering) is the practice of placing a number in the right-hand margin of a court document beside every tenth line of text — so line 10, line 20, line 30 and so on are marked down the page. It applies to pleadings, affidavits, witness statements, written submissions and records of appeal.

Why do courts require it?

Line numbers turn a wall of text into an addressable document. During a hearing, a judge or advocate can say “page 14, line 30” and everyone in the courtroom finds the passage instantly. Without line numbers, referencing a specific averment in a long affidavit means counting lines by hand — slow, error-prone and frustrating on the bench. Numbering every line would clutter the margin; every tenth line is the long-standing compromise.

Which countries and courts require tenth lining?

The requirement is an inheritance from the former Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa, whose rules of practice were carried into the national court rules of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda when the court was dissolved in 1977. That shared history is why the same formatting convention appears across East Africa today:

• Kenya — the Court of Appeal Practice Directions state that every tenth line of every document shall be numbered in the right-hand margin, and the convention is expected across the Magistrates’ Courts and the High Court for pleadings, affidavits, submissions and court bundles. See our Kenya formatting guide.
• Tanzania — Rule 96 of the Tanzania Court of Appeal Rules, 2009 (GN 368 of 2009, as amended in 2019) governs the form of the record of appeal. The Court of Appeal has struck out records where every tenth line of each page was not indicated in the right-hand margin. See our Rule 96 guide.
• Uganda — the Judicature (Court of Appeal Rules) Directions, SI 13-10, and the Supreme Court Rules contain the equivalent requirements on the binding of records and the numbering of pages and lines, drawn from the same East African heritage.

In practice, any advocate preparing an appellate record in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Kampala faces the same task: a cleanly paginated document with tenth line numbers in the margin.

What happens if a document is not tenth lined?

Consequences range from mild to severe. A registry may reject the filing and ask you to re-lodge it, costing you days. A judge may criticise the omission in open court. In the strictest scenario — seen in Tanzanian Court of Appeal decisions applying Rule 96 — an improperly formatted record of appeal can be struck out altogether, taking the appeal down with it. For a formatting detail, the stakes are surprisingly high.

How to tenth line a document

Manually in Microsoft Word

Word’s built-in line numbering (Layout → Line Numbers) counts every line and prints the numbers in the left margin, so it does not satisfy the convention on its own. The common manual workarounds — text boxes in the margin, a two-column table, or typing numbers into a narrow right-hand column — all share the same weakness: edit a paragraph and every number below it shifts, forcing you to recount the whole document.

Automatically with TenthLiner

TenthLiner does the counting for you. Upload a PDF or Word (.docx) document, choose your court’s format, and download a court-ready tenth-lined document in seconds. You preview the output before paying per page via M-Pesa, and your document is deleted from our servers within about an hour of processing.