Author: LawFlow

This update includes two significant new features: redundant email detection, and duplicate image detection. We’ll post more on these features later. In the meantime, here is a summary of the new features and improvements in this update.

New features

• Redundant email detection – automatic detection of whether the text of an email in a thread (chain) is incorporated in a later reply in the thread.
• Apparent duplicate image detection – for finding substantively duplicate images (in native form and embedded in PDFs).
• Added a search option for finding documents with embedded documents.

Improvements

• Improved email thread detection for native emails (Outlook MSG files and extracted Outlook PSTs).
• Improved text duplicates detection: the system now attempts to detect discovery number stamps applied on other parties’ documents, and ignore them when checking for text duplicates. This can significantly improve text duplicate detection with documents received from other parties.
• Improved similar document detection algorithm.
• Better organisation of per-repository sub-categories in main Documents page.
• ‘Open in new tab’ link added to related documents.
• Improved search box for selecting authors & recipients on Discovery tab.
• Improved detection of hidden content in Excel files.
• Option to limit the length of the recipients column when browsing documents. This prevents a very long number of recipients from causing layout issues (e.g. pushing other content off the screen).
• Additions and removals of documents on custom lists is now logged in document history.
• More information on folder hide/delete pages.
• Improved performance of apparent duplicate email detection.
• Improved scaling of native images when converting to PDF format.
• Improved performance of “go to document” function.
• Project export bundle now includes a hyperlinked index.
• Improved ability to extract text from some email files with non-standard/malformed HTML content.
• Various performance improvements & fixes.

We hope everyone is doing well during the COVID-19 lockdown. Highlights of this update:

New features

• Saved searches: you can now save a search configuration to re-use in multiple searches.
• Support for Outlook for Mac (OLM) files (the Mac equivalent of a PST file).
• Support for 7-zip (7z) compressed archive files. Uploaded 7z files will extract in the same manner as Zip files.
• Ability to set custom “badge” text for issues. This is useful for showing a shorter badge (e.g. an abbreviation or acronym) for issues with longer names.
• Option to tag all search results directly from the search results page (without having to use the document tray function).

Improvements

• Improved detection of email dates from non-native emails.
• Improved performance of the Analysis and Parties pages.
• Easier merging of document types.
• Easier editing of issues.
• Add documents to tray function now shows more detail about matched documents.
• Improved performance when searching multiple lists.

We are still working very hard on exciting new features, in the meantime here is a summary of new features and improvements since the last update:

New features

• Addition of a new list export mode: “Native format with sensitive document exceptions“. This mode exports list documents in native format except if the native document has one or more “sensitive” attachments (being a visible or hidden attachment that is set as privileged, confidential, or redacted, or unreviewed for privilege or confidentiality and therefore potentially sensitive). For those documents, they are exported in PDF format instead.
• List bundles: option to skip the generation of a placeholder PDF for native file exceptions in a PDF bundle generation.
• Option to limit by repository when adding documents to the tray by production number. This makes it easier when the same production number has been used in multiple repositories.
• Option to ignore mismatched documents when adding documents to the tray by ID.
• Print option added to document preview pane.
• Barcode scanning: you can now use a special separator sheet for use when the next document is an attachment of the previous top-level document. This allows a bulk-scanned PDF to be automatically split into separate top-level documents and attachments.
• Category for browsing privileged documents that have no privilege category.
• Scanned PDF detection: ability to detect in some cases whether a PDF is a scanned document, as opposed to a text-based PDF.
• Vector-based PDF detection: ability to detect in some cases whether a PDF includes vector content, as opposed to text or image-based content.

Improvements

• Faster extraction of PST email archives.
• Better performance of apparent duplicate detection.
• Better performance of zipping document bundles.
• Some improvements to descriptions in statistics reports.
• Warning before displaying very large text and XML files.
• Better handling of extremely large history exports to Excel (now spans across multiple tabs).
• Better detection of poor-quality barcode separator pages in bulk scans.
• Better performance for bulk-linking a large number of documents to an issue.
• Various general performance improvements.

Thanks to all of our great users for their support and feedback.

This update includes some useful new functionality in the search tool, and significant performance improvements particularly for large projects.

New features

• New search options:
  • You can now search documents by party role (i.e. author and/or recipient), specify multiple authors/recipients/both on an “all” or “any” basis, and specify separate “must include” and “must exclude” criteria. This makes it easier to carry out searches such as “all documents authored by A or B, and received by X and Y“.
  • Added the ability to search for multiple tags on an “all” or “any” basis.
  • There are now separate options for searching documents explicitly marked as “undated”, or documents that have not had any date information set.
  • Added the ability to search documents by discovery workflow status – partially reviewed documents and fully reviewed documents.
• Support for digitally signed & encrypted emails (P7M/P7S S/MIME).
• Automatic extraction of Outlook OST cache files (not to be confused with regular Outlook PST email archives, which LawFlow has always been able to automatically extract).  LawFlow could previously extract Outlook OST files with helpdesk support. This update includes automatic processing of uploaded OST files.
• Ability to view workflow status information for tray documents.

Improvements

• Significant performance improvements for very large projects, in particular browsing & viewing documents and generating long discovery lists.
• Added ability to easily view hidden attachments from a parent document.
• Improved layout of search options.
• More search tips.
• More robust process for expiring (i.e. refreshing) browser-cached versions of live-preview list document PDFs.
• Date range searching now supports partial dates (e.g. 0/11/2019 instead of a specific date in November 2019).

We are continuing to roll out lots of new features and improvements to LawFlow, New Zealand’s e-discovery solution. Highlights from recent updates include:

New features

• Statistics module. This enables you to generate statistical analyses, in raw data and visual form, of your project documents. Available reports include:
  • Email volumes;
  • Email sender/recipient & subject analysis;
  • File type  & document type analysis;
  • Discovery metrics.
• Word lists for searching.  This allows you to create & save “word lists” for carrying out searches on a list of words or phrases. You can create multiple word lists, and combine them in various ways to carry out powerful searches.
• Ability to search for multiple email addresses (or email domains, or display names) at a time, and the addition of a second criteria to allow searches such as “emails from A or B, and sent to C or D”.

Improvements

• Improved indexing of documents for more consistent searching.
• More helpful error messages on invalid search queries.
• Searching on email subject field now allows wildcards and boolean search operators.
• Improved identification and extraction of email calendar item information.
• Extraction of embedded attachments in Rich Text Format (RTF) files, where possible.
• Detection of hidden content in Word documents now includes hidden images.
• Detection of hidden content in PowerPoint documents now includes hidden slides.
• Improved duplicate detection of Word documents containing only images.
• Performance improvement for indexing documents, which means documents can be searched sooner after upload.
• Improved performance for adding family documents to a large number of tray documents.
• Automatic correction of some invalid email address encoding in native email files.
• Improved detection of inline images in native email files with body text in RTF format.
• Option to remove selected images from the “junk image removal” tool (i.e. to designate selected images as “not junk”).
• Improved detection of the LawFlow separator page in bulk scanned PDFs using separator pages.
• Party codes (abbreviations) of parent organisations referenced in lists are now included in the abbreviations table.
• Automatic processing of Outlook OST files (“offline storage” files, similar but different to regular PST files which LawFlow also supports).
• Lots of performance improvements.

Coming soon

We are working hard on lots of exciting features to help users analyse and cut-through ever-growing volumes of electronic documents. Features coming soon include:

• Advanced text analytic tools to help analyse large volumes of electronic discovery documents. This will include the ability to find common words & phrases, assess text quality, and view content-related statistics.
• Email chain culling – the ability to safely identify and remove “redundant” emails in a chain, where the content of the email is replicated in a later reply.
• Automatic detection of email disclaimers and other ‘boilerplate’, to improve the effectiveness of similarity & duplicate detection.
• Advanced email deduplication tools.

Thank you as always to our fantastic customers for your feedback and support. If you have any requested features or ideas on how we can make New Zealand’s e-discovery solution even better, please get in touch with us.

Thanks as always to our awesome customers, for making us the leading e-discovery solution in New Zealand. We’ve got loads of new features coming up in the next few months, including new tools for handling duplicates, analytics functions, and the new electronic casebook module. In the meantime, here are highlights of the latest update.

New features

• “Look-through” folders: the ability to browse folders on a “look-through” basis. This shows documents in the selected folder as well as those in any subfolders. This is useful if you want to browse documents in a tree of folders without having to click through into each subfolder.
• Ability to specify a type of confidentiality when setting a document as confidential (e.g. commercial sensitivity, personal information).
• Automatic & domain detection for some MS Exchange-style (X.500) addresses on native emails.
• Automatic detection and removal of blank image attachments on native emails, such as “spacer” images.
• Automatic detection and removal of some system properties attachment from PDFs (such as added by Acrobat Distiller).
• Added category for browsing privileged documents across all repositories.
• Ability to use custom fields in automatic index templates for electronic casebooks.

Improvements

• Improved performance when adding large numbers of documents to the tray.
• Improved performance when looking up documents by production number or filename.
• Better handling of non-standard and corrupted attachments when attempting to extract attachments from a PDF.
• Better parsing of non-standard email addresses on native emails.
• Better handling of surplus/redundant barcode separator pages for bulk-scanned PDFs.
• Ability to create PDF versions of some non-standard Outlook appointment requests with email body text.
• Improved performance for hiding empty subfolders.
• Performance improvements to email archive (PST/MBOX) extraction.
• Improved layout of long email addresses when linking email addresses to parties.
• Better validation of the end date of a date range on the discovery tab.

It’s been a very busy few months!  Thanks to our users for providing such great feedback.  This update includes a lot of performance improvements, which are particularly noticeable on larger projects (100k+ documents). We have a number of major features currently in the pipeline which we’ll roll out over the coming months, and post about here.

New features

• Viewing documents on lists now shows a live-rendered stamped version of the document by default.
• Very large PDFs now show a “click-through” page before starting to display.
• Auto-detection of Office 2007 Excel & Word files saved with a generic XML filename.
• Support for Microsoft OneNote “.one” files.
• Support for EPUB e-book files.
• Automatic extraction of embedded file attachments in Excel and Word documents (previously, these were only visually displayed as they are in Word and Excel).
• Workflow view for tags.

Improvements

• Improved handling of invalid/corrupt/non-renderable Office documents.
• Improved handling of zip files containing non-standard filenames and inconsistent cases of internal paths.
• Improved performance of the project home page.
• Improved performance of the discovery workflow category.
• Improved performance of the allocated documents category.
• Some PDFs created with the redaction tool were not displaying correctly in Acrobat Reader, due to invalid image data in the original PDF. The redaction tool now attempts to workaround any invalid image data, which resolves the issue in most cases.
• Improved performance of unlinking email addresses from parties that have a large number of auto-linked documents.
• Improved handling of invalid/corrupt inline images in emails.
• Improved performance of mapping file (loadfile) processing.
• The bundle filename of list documents is now included in general list reports.
• Improved algorithm for auto-detecting non-native emails.
• Improved algorithm for auto-detecting dates in non-native emails.
• Improved performance of document processing & conversion after documents are imported.
• Improved performance when browsing tags by repository, and key docs by repository.
• Mapping files now exclude hidden/filtered rows from processing.
• Numerous general performance improvements.

New features

• Browsing email threads (a.k.a. email chains) now shows summary information about the thread.
• LawFlow now identifies whether uploaded PDFs (including those extracted from emails) are password-protected (i.e. locked), and provides a function to permanently unlock PDFs within the project. You can also browse all password-protected PDFs.
• LawFlow now checks uploaded PDFs to for apparent corruption/invalidity and provides more information to users.

Improvements

• Improved process for browsing email threads.
• Button to open a document in a new tab.
• Password-protected PDFs can now be included with a compiled PDF bundle. A placeholder is used in the compiled PDF, and the password-protected PDF is separately included in the bundle.
• Better handling of corrupt/invalid PDFs in bundles (a corrupt/invalid PDF no longer prevents bundle generation).
• Tray menu now shows if a tray document is hidden.
• Table column headings remain visible while scrolling long lists in more places.

New features

• LawFlow now attempts to detect and identify Word & Excel documents containing revisions (a.k.a. tracked changes or markup), embedded versions (obsolete feature in pre-Word 2007 documents), and hidden text (text with the specific ‘hidden’ setting applide). You can search for documents with these attributes detected, and the viewer displays a tip if you are viewing such a document. Reminder: as with all automatic document analyses, this feature depends on the compatibility/validity of the files and the ability of the system to accurately detect the attributes.
• The upload page now shows upload speed and estimated time remaining.
• Automatic detection of some file types for documents with missing file extensions. Occasionally, email attachments are incorrectly encoded with the result that they ‘lose’ their file extensions. LawFlow now attempts to auto-detect the file type for extensionless files of some common types.
• Ability to search for documents with white-outs applied (using the built-in white-out tool).
• A casebook can now be compiled into a single PDF file. Previously, each folder could be compiled to a single PDF. This new feature allows the entire casebook to be compiled, which is handy for printing.

Enhancements

• Ability to customise bookmarks (using fields) in compiled PDFs.
• Quick-search filter added to “resolve email address” page.
• Ability to use LibreOffice/OpenOffice spreadsheet file (ODS) as mapping file.
• Improved error messages for invalid mapping files.
• Finding a document by internal ID (with @ prefix) using the “go to” function only shows exact matches.
• Performance improvements.