Category: Updates

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.

Happy New Year!  We’ve been busy adding updates of the summer break, and have a great set of further updates in the works. Highlights of this update include:

New features

• Auto-split scanned documents using a scan separator page (a page containing a QR code that LawFlow recognises and uses to automatically split the PDF). This provides a new option for bulk-loading scanned documents into the system, together with the existing method of splitting using an Excel spreadsheet.
• Date range support. Previously, documents could be given only a single date (either specific or “partial”). The discovery tab now allows you to enter a date range where applicable, and then use the date range in date-based searches.
• PDF cropping tool, for trimming excess white-space from PDF page(s)

Improvements

• Performance improvements with large projects.
• Numerous improvements to electronic casebook module.
• More options for inserting electronic casebook hyperlinks.
• More options for stamping list documents.
• Split PDF tool now handles PDFs with “PDF/A” encoding.

This update includes a number of customer-requested features and improvements. Thank you to our great users for your suggestions and feedback, and ongoing support!

New features

• Specific function for hiding non-discoverable documents.
• Ability to import and store external document IDs (i.e. where a document has been exported from another system, and you wish to retain the previous system’s assigned ID).
• Zoom large images by double-click.
• Ability to cross-reference list numbers/pages between two lists.
• Page borders for list documents.
• Option to search non-redacted documents.
• Two-factor SMS authentication option.

Improvements

• Updated PDF viewer, with better performance and ‘find in document’ function.
• Link email address to author/recipient shows auto-suggest names.
• Documents page returns to current category upon refresh.
• Browse documents in list context.
• Option to include additional columns in Excel version of a custom list (i.e. same as available for discovery lists).
• Improved searching of email addresses and domain names.
• Option to disable whether a tag is shown as a ‘badge’ when browsing documents.
• Option to specify alternative badge text for tags.
• Separate fields for actual date and custom date in Excel reports (useful when both fields are being used).
• Improved creation of PDF hyperlinks to work on Mac OS systems (avoiding invalid characters).
• Better detection of imported production numbers.

New features

• Option to set watermark colours (instead of just grey)
• Index templates for electronic casebooks
• Option for inserting placeholder references in hyperlinked casebook documents
• Ability to create casebook hyperlinks with “continuous” list numbering
• Ability to import custom date and privilege fields in mapping files

Improvements

• Improved detection of email duplicates
• Ability to bulk-download hidden documents
• Improved handling of non-standard mapping file column names
• Improved word-wrapping of hyperlinks in casebook documents

New features

• Live rendering of list & casebook documents
• When viewing an unknown file type, there is now an option for viewing the file in plain text.
• New search option to include or exclude tray documents

Improvements

• Faster splitting & page deletion on very large PDFs
• Improved detection of duplicate text on emails with minor time differences
• Improved handling of emails from different timezones
• Improved tidying of extracted email names and addresses
• Better handling of non-standard recipient fields in Outlook MSG files
• Ability to set a party code when creating a new party via the “link email addresses” tool
• Completed review tasks show the user who set the task as completed
• More information provided on mapping (import document information) errors
• Better handling of Word tables with irregular columns in mapping files
• Casebook hyperlinks should now work in most standard desktop PDF viewers (tested in Acrobat, Foxit and NitroPDF)
• Improved text conversion of HTML table data
• Better performance for tagging large numbers of documents
• Support for playing M4A audio files directly in the browser

New features

• Option to apply stamps on alternating sides of a page, which is useful for double-sided printing.
• Inclusion of ‘sort date’ in exported document lists.
• Option to limit search by documents in the tray.

Improvements

• Project can be re-indexed while continuing to use existing index to search.
• Improved interface for junk text tool.

Performance

• Better performance for bulk operations on large numbers of documents, such as hiding, deleting and moving documents, setting discovery information, and merging folders.
• Further improvements to PST extraction performance.
• Faster browsing on Documents page for large projects.