united-kingdom contract-law european-union ireland
Do contracts require pages or clauses numbered?
<p>A question asked by another member about missing pages in a lease brings to my mind the question of whether there is a legal requirement for contract pages to be numbered so that it is e.g. obvious when a plaintiff or defendant has simply omitted inconvenient pages ?</p>
<p>I generally see clauses being numbered, but I don't know if this is a requirement or not - I have no legal training myself.</p>
<p>I am particularly interested in my own country (Ireland) and the UK and EU but other jurisdictions are of naturally of interest.</p>

<p>I do not believe that there is any requirement to number clauses, paragraphs, or pages, and I have certainly seen contracts where none of these are numbered. It is a common practice to number provisions in some way, in particular to make reference from one to another easier. But not all contracts include such internal references.</p>
<p>Contracts presented in electronic form, such as on a web page, may not have any clear concept of separate pages, and so page numbers would be pointless on such contracts.</p>
<p>Page numbers on contracts printed out are common, but I do not know of any legal requirement for such numbers.</p>
<p>For contracts presented in electronic form, one can ensure against unauthorized modification by including a checksum or hash of the contract text. If a one-way hash function is used, it will be quite hard to produce a text with a different content but an identical hash value. This technique could also be used on printed contracts. However, I do not recall seeing this technique used in practice.</p>
