How to create a hearing Bundle
General PDF software can be used to create the main bookmarked, indexed and paginated PDF for a hearing, and also to create an authorities bundle - containing statutes and case-law - for the a hearing.
In the last 10 years software services specifically designed for eBundle production in the legal sector have become common and these do have some advantages over using general PDF software, but use of ordinary PDF software is still a feasible option.
In general the disadvantages of using general PDF software compared to legal-sector software services are:
General PDF software can arrange documents by file-system date-modified but the file-system date-modified of a PDF scan of a paper document, for example, will be just the date it was scanned, not the date of the document itself. It is possible to prefix document filenames with the date in yyyy-mm-dd format, and use that instead to sort them in alphanumeric sequence, but yyyy-mm-dd is not a very intuitive format for dates.
Using general PDF software it is possible to add hyperlinks to the main PDF (e.g. hyperlink from a sentence in a statement to the document referred to) but if the main PDF has to be recreated again from the individual documents (e.g. if new documents are added or some documents removed or renamed) then the hyperlinks are lost.
For authorities bundles, however, using general PDF software does have one advantage:
Highlighted documents, when loaded to a legal-sector software service, are usually flattened in the PDF produced by the system. This is a problem because you will generally want highlighting in an authorities bundle to be unflattened so that it can be removed when sending out the authorities bundle but retained when using your own copy.