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Another long time since our last update! Rest assured, we have been very busy. Many of the changes since our last update are “behind the scenes”, but we have continued to add some front-facing features and improvements.

Thank you as always to our wonderful customers for your feedback and ideas.

Discovery tool

New features

• Search aliases
• A list of the page numbers with one or more redactions is shown when viewing a redacted document.
• “Remember me on this device” option on two-factor authentication, to reduce the need to re-authenticate after each login on the same device.
• Ability to browse documents with custom fields.

Improvements

• Improved performance of browsing hidden documents in large projects.
• Improved performance of large custom lists.
• Improved performance of allocating large numbers of documents to users.
• Added direct download option for virtual folders.
• MD5 hash column added to discovery list “extra columns” option.
• Combining redacted documents now allows editing of the combined redacted versions.
• Combining redacted documents now combines the “look-through” redacted versions.
• More helpful messages for a user attempting to access a restricted document.
• Improved advanced email deduplication.
• Improved detection of inline/background images in native emails (reduces the occasions where an inline/background images is extracted as an attachment).
• Improved performance for merging parties on very large projects.
• Ability to accommodate some mis-formatting/inconsistencies in production number stamps added to PDFs by other parties/systems when detecting production numbers.
• Improved handling & normalisation of irregular characters in imported PDFs.
• Improved ability to rotate and scale PDFs with irregular properties.

Casebook tool

• Ability to add hyperlinked annotations to an existing PDF.
• Smarter pagination of multi-page indexes (avoid table breaks too near the top or bottom of a page).
• Identify the parts of automatically split documents in an index.
• Option to restart tab numbers on each series volume.
• Option to restart tab numbers in a series block.
• Modified the default index template to be more consistent with the examples in the Practice Note.
• Improved appearance of indexes with no documents.
• Greatly improved performance when generating very large indexes (100+ pages).
• Easier way to select references when manually hyperlinking a PDF.
• Improved error messages for invalid references when manually hyperlinking a PDF.
• Hyperlink errors in footnotes now state which footnote.
• Colour selection for stamps.
• Option to use “natural” ordering when ordering by name (e.g. 1, 2, 3 … 10, 11, 12 instead of 1, 10, 11, 12 … 2, 20, 21).
• Badge for documents with noted objections.
• Improved handling of ambiguous references.
• Ability to use imported page numbers as hyperlink references.

After a series of rolling updates, here is a selection of new features and improvements:

New features

• Look-through redactions: when you create a redacted version of a document in LawFlow, the system now additionally creates a separate look-through version with translucent redaction boxes, so you can see behind the redaction. This makes it easier to review redactions, and provides a convenient way to show permitted parties what has been redacted.
• Redaction page tracking: when you create a redacted version of a document in LawFlow, the system now records which pages have had redactions made on them. This can help with reviewing redactions, and being able to advise other parties which pages in a document have been redacted.
• Faster redactions: the redaction process now only processes pages that have one or more redactions. This provides a major performance improvement for longer documents where only a few pages are being redacted.
• Smaller redactions: due to an improved process, redacted documents are now typically significantly smaller in filesize than previously.
• Translation support: this release adds the ability to attach a translation (either in plain-text, Word or PDF format) to a document. For documents with attached translations, you are able to view the translation together with the original document, and search on the translation text. Further planned enhancements will allow the translated versions to be included in bundles.
• When files are extracted from a zip or 7-zip archive, the File Created and Last Modified dates are recorded against the extracted documents.

Improvements

• Significant overall performance improvements for large projects.
• Searching: the ability to exclude documents matching one or more word lists (previously, searches could only include documents matching one or more word lists).
• Searching: improved highlighting of search results.
• Improved performance of the Discovery tab’s “Document type” box with a very large number of document type.
• Improved performance for bulk linking and unlinking of documents to email addresses.
• Improved performance and integrity checking of zip file extraction.
• Significantly improved performance of 7-zip file extraction (especially for very large, multi-GB 7z files).
• Automatic removal of Mac OS “resource fork” junk files from uploaded zip & 7-zip archives.
• Deleting pages from a PDF now removes all bookmarks (outline entries) from the PDF.
• Processing of barcode-separated batch scans (automatically splitting of scanned PDFs with separator sheets) now supports image-compressed PDFs.
• Better handling of zero-byte files (zero-byte files are usually the result of incorrectly or incompletely processed files).
• Parent production number column added to Excel discovery list with “extra columns” enabled.
• Improved validation of date values when importing discovery information.

A feature of our September update of LawFlow that we are particularly excited about is our new OCR system. While LawFlow has always provided OCR capability, the September update implements a new custom system that we have been developing for some time, incorporating leading OCR technology, and tailored specifically for e-discovery.

Key improvements of the new OCR system include:

• Significantly reduced lead time for uploaded documents to be OCRd.
• More robust processing due to improved identification and handling of corrupt or malformed PDFs.
• The ability to OCR more DRM-protected PDF files (some DRM restrictions may still prevent specific PDFs being processed).
• The ability to perform OCR on detected image-based pages within an otherwise text-based PDF. This can occur where text images are inserted into a natively-generated PDF, or where text-based and image-based PDFs are merged into one.
• Improved detection of document number stamps (frequently applied in e-discovery) that otherwise prevent a PDF (or certain pages of it) from being a candidate for OCR.
• Confidence scoring of OCR-processed documents.
• Detection of specific pages with low confidence scores.
• Separate processing of longer documents in order to reduce delays in processing smaller, faster-processable documents.

As with our previous OCR system, the new system is not cloud-based but is fully hosted on our hardware right here in New Zealand. This means we do not send project data to a third-party or overseas for OCR processing.

OCR accuracy

As always with OCR, accuracy depends heavily on the quality and characteristics of the input. In general terms, well-scanned clean black-and-white block text with standard fonts & font sizing is likely to produce a relatively accurate OCR result. Conversely, lower-quality scans, non-standard fonts, stylised/coloured layout, marks on the image, etc will likely result in lower accuracy.

However even with high quality input, there can still be inaccuracies – a “good” OCR accuracy rate is considered to be around 95-99%. There can also be complications and inaccuracies in reconstructing the OCR text into sentences or paragraphs. This should be taken into consideration when searching or otherwise using OCR-generated text.

OCR processing

The outline of the new OCR system’s basic processing stages for each document in a project (which remains similar to the previous system) is as follows:

1. Determine whether the document is of a type suitable for OCR (PDF or supported image files). If not, do not attempt OCR.
2. For PDF documents, if every page of this PDF file already contains detectable text above a de minimis level (after attempting to exclude any detected document number stamps) then do not attempt OCR.
3. Run OCR process on the document (for PDFs, do this only for pages excluding any with detectable text above the de minimis level).
4. If the OCR process detected any text, convert the document to a searchable PDF with the OCR text applied.
5. Index the OCR detected text (for use in searching).

If you have any questions about our new OCR system or how to handle OCR text in your discovery project, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help!