Document Review on Everlaw

Everlaws's document review platform is more intuitive and visually appealing than Relativity, and includes several functions which the more widely used platform lacks.

When setting up a search, you not only have the option to include other family members or near duplicates, but you can also exclude certain documents from the groups added to the search term results. A graphic is included to make clear which documents without keyword hits will be added in the results.

As you select the option to include other versions, attachments, duplicates, or members of the same email thread as the documents which match your search criteria, Everlaw will calculate the percentage of additional documents that will be returned.

There's also an option to exclude duplicate documents from the results.

Everlaw's canonical metadata function will standardize entries in similar metadata fields - so entries of custodian names in fields named, 'Custod'; 'Custodian'; 'Doc Cust' will be merged. Users have the option to toggle between the original metadata and the Everlaw version on the layout in the document viewer.

It is also possible to search on any metadata field in the layout for documents which have the same value:

Everlaw also does a good job of tracking links between documents, indicating the 'backlink' for a document, or another document available in the database which contains a OneDrive or Google Vault link to the current document.

Everlaw's Difference Viewer makes it easy to identify where multiple versions of a single document have been edited. It gives you the ability to scroll through the sections which differ, and then review the variants in the panel to the right.

Tracking entries in checkboxes with Abbyy FineReader

I am currently using an older version [v.11 - Professional Edition] of the Abbyy FineReader OCR software to render text for several thousand PDFs. The software does something which I have found to not be possible with Adobe Acrobat Pro or version 12 of the FoxIt PDF Editor software. It will successively pick up a check mark or 'X' in a check box.

The software often gets the mark perfectly as:

[X]

. . . but will sometimes substitute a 'K' or if there's a check in the box:

. . . it will enter a minuscule character like this: ø

An empty checkbox may get converted to an 'n' or just an empty box: □

But it interprets the marks consistently so if you're analyzing thousands of documents you can successfully track when checkboxes were ticked off.

Formatting Text Files to Load Correctly

If you have to re-format a text file to load it correctly into Lexis TextMap, it will be important to get several things exactly right. If not, it's possible that you'll get an error message like this one:

The transcript may still be loaded if this message appears, but you'll have the line numbers added into the text itself, so they'll be selected when the text is. Searching through the transcript may also be adversely affected.

In order to conform a text file to the Amicus format used by TextMap, be sure to follow each of these steps:

1. Make sure that each page break is identified by a four digit number listed by itself on one line.

2. Each line number should be listed at least three spaces before the transcript text. There should be one space before the single digit line numbers.

3. No line should be more than 70 characters long. (I've seen documentation stating that each line should be no longer than 78 characters, but the actual limit appears to be smaller.) Note that you can run a regular expression search for lines longer than 70 characters using this form:

.{70,}

. . . which is for any character repeated 70 or more times. In the free text editor, NotePad++, the position on a line will be listed at the bottom as the 'column' in which the character appears.

4. Also confirm that there are no blank whitespaces at the end of each line, and that the last text on the line is followed by a carriage return and new line marker.

5. If you have any pages which are longer than 25 lines, have the line numbering run from 1 to 25 on rows 1 to 25, and then leave the last lines unnumbered.

6. Confirm that the transcript doesn't have any blank lines. Make sure that it doesn't end with a blank line!

7. If all else fails, try copying the text into an entirely new file in NotePad, and saving it in the format of a 'Normal text file'.

See also the Tip of the Night for January 29, 2022, which discusses how to remove non-ASCII text.