Analyzing Excel Data and Preparing Chronologies with Copilot

These days it's widely appreciated not only among litigation support professionals, but also among attorneys and law firm employees in general, that generative AI can quickly and reliably perform many common tasks such as document review or document summarization which previously would have taken many hours to complete.

Here's a demonstration of just how easy it is to use Microsoft's Copilot AI to review data in an Excel file, and the content of a set of PDFs.

This is a .csv file containing baseball batting statistics from 1871 to 2023, which can be downloaded here.

If you simply upload the file to copilot and ask a general question, it can give you an accurate example. In this example, you can see that I have asked about the number of home runs hit by players for the New York Mets, but I have not specified the abbreviation used for this team ("NYN"), or the abbreviation used for a home run ("HR") used in the .csv file.

. . . and yet still copilot gives me accurate results. Note that it uses the abbreviations for player names used in the Batting.csv source file - so it's not getting the information from a general knowledge set.

It can also easily generate a visualization of the search results like this bar graph:

. . . and will upon request modify the chart to show the data according to a different metric.

Copilot may be very literal in interrupting the instructions you give it. Here when I asked for a list of players hitting higher than .400 in a season it included players with very few at bats.

. . .however it prompted me to give more specific instructions. Keep in mind that batting averages are not actually listed in the source data - copilot knows to perform the calculation by dividing the number of hits by the number of at bats.

Copilot also gives you the option to export the results from any operation it performs:

You will get your own Excel file to work with.

I also tested how copilot performed analyzing multiple document PDFs using trial exhibits from the Enron litigation which are available on the DOJ's web site: https://www.justice.gov/archive/index-enron.html

Copilot did not do a good job OCRing the PDFs - the supposedly text-searchable PDFs that it generated were actually files with blank pages.

The free version of copilot will only allow you to upload 3 files at once.

When I asked it to tell me the dates of three PDFs - each of a different document type - it not only gave me the correct dates, but also provided an accurate summary of each document without being asked to.

Note how for the PDF named, 'EXH063-00292.pdf' it's able to correctly identify the author and the pinpoint purpose of the letter.

brackets cause PowerShell scripts to fail

Keep in mind when you're drafting a PowerShell script that if any of the filepaths referenced in it contain beginning or ending brackets, the script will fail. So if we set up a simple copy-item script like this in Excel:

. . . which copies files from one location to a new one, renamed with a new filename, but the filepaths include a bracketed word, the script will fail without giving an error message that something is wrong.

The files in the first location are simply not copied to the new folder at all, and no error message flags the problem in the PowerShell blue console at the bottom.

We can get around this problem by adding a backtick ` in front of each beginning and ending bracket in the script. (Be sure to use a backtick and not an apostrophe.) You can enter a backtick by pressing ALT + 096. If your filepath is listed in double quotes, use two backticks in front of each bracket; if the path is enclosed in single quotes use just one backtick.

So the updated script will look like this:

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 001.pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit A.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 002 ``[redacted``].pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit B.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 003.pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit C.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 004 ``[redacted``].pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit D.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 005.pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit E.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 006 ``[redacted``].pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit F.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 007.pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit G.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 008 ``[redacted``].pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit H.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 009.pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit I.pdf"

copy-item -Path "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhibit 010 ``[redacted``].pdf" -Destination "C:\foofolder\test\powershell\Exhs A to Z\Exhibit J.pdf"

. . . and give you the result you wanted:

The trick to adding highlighting to pages pasted into PowerPoint

When creating PowerPoint slide decks for openings, closings, or witness examinations, you almost certainly will be called upon to create some slides which contain highlighted document text. If you use the highlighter tool that you find on the Draw ribbon, you'll find it difficult to highlight multiple lines of text evenly:

To get the neat rectangular box that the highlighter tool in Trial Director or OnCue will add to text, first paste the document image as a picture on a PowerPoint slide:

. . . with the picture selected, in the 'Picture Format' ribbon that appears on the right select the drop-down menu for Color, and then select 'Set Transparent Color'.

. . . the cursor will change to include a little syringe next to the arrow:

Click on the white part of the page, and the white of the page will then be made transparent in the slideshow.

Create a rectangular box (Insert . . . Shapes), with the fill color set to yellow, and no line set for the edges.

Right-click on the box and set it as the default shape. Then right-click again, and send the yellow box to the back. The text in the document image will appear highlighted.

When adding highlighting it will be easier to make changes if you use the hot key CTRL + SHIFT + [ to send images to the back, and CTRL + SHIFT + ] to send images to the front.