We have rolled out two updates this month, adding a number of new features, performance improvements, and fixes.
Performance improvements
To keep up with the rapidly growing usage of LawFlow by New Zealand firms, we have made some behind-the-scenes performance improvements. These are aimed at improving overall performance and keeping the system ‘snappy’, especially when browsing documents. We have also ironed out some bottlenecks that could arise at peak times.
As always, for best performance you should use a high-speed network connection and a modern browser. If you are browsing PDF documents in particular, we recommend Google Chrome or Firefox over Internet Explorer, because Chrome and Firefox have built-in PDF viewers which are often faster and more stable than using a PDF plug-in with Internet Explorer.
We find Google Chrome is usually the fastest, but different options may work for you.
Multi-level discovery lists
LawFlow now supports multi-level (subgrouped) discovery lists. This allows discovery lists to be sub-divided into multiple levels or subgroups, e.g.:
- ABC.001 … ABC.025
- ABC.UnitA.001 … ABC.UnitA.007
- ABC.UnitB.001 .. ABC.UnitB.015
- Etc.
While you could always create this structure manually, the latest update makes this a built-in feature.
Automatic date extraction from scanned PDFs & other documents
LawFlow has always been able to extract dates from native emails (e.g. emails extracted from PST files and .MSG and .EML files), and document properties (subject to file compatibility). However, it could not do this for scanned documents where the structure and internal data of the native had been lost.
LawFlow now attempts to extract the date from scanned PDFs (after OCR-ing the PDFs, if necessary). While this is always subject to OCR capabilities and is not as effective as reading the date from native email files, it attempts to extracts identified dates which can be a useful time-saver. Of course, extracted dates can be changed if necessary.
Other improvements
- Better identification of privileged & confidential documents (documents set as privileged or confidential now display this information more prominently)
- Improved highlighting of search terms in results
- Boolean search operators (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’) can now be lower case or upper case
- Improved extraction of text from PDFs with columns and other non-linear layout
- More ways to tag groups of documents
- Ability to browse documents by date where the documents have partial dates, and custom dates
- Easy way to switch between discovery list bundle download and report generation
- Ability to upload documents with non-Windows-compatible filenames (e.g. some filenames that are valid on Macs are invalid on Windows PCs)
As always, thanks to our users for providing feedback and ideas. As the users who are carrying out discovery, we welcome your thoughts on how we can continue to improve LawFlow to make your process more efficient and effective.