Category: Updates

It’s been a long time since our last update! In the past year we have been focusing our efforts on two main areas:

1. Electronic Casebook module. This tool is specifically designed to create hyperlinked, paginated electronic casebooks (and print versions) in accordance with the Senior Courts Civil Electronic Document Protocol. It has been in production testing with various firms since early 2022, and has successfully produced dozens of casebooks. We are now rolling out this feature to all customers – another announcement will follow soon!
2. Performance. As projects continue to grow in size, and new features and options for managing them are added, we have worked hard on optimising performance. In particular, for very large projects (with 1 million+ documents) we have made significant improvements in both user experience and back-end processing. We are also moving to bigger and faster servers to handle the ongoing increases in user numbers and project storage.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the changes since our last update.

New features

• Integration of the Electronic Casebook module. This lets you directly copy documents from your discovery project into your casebook project, and keep track of which discovery documents have been nominated.
• Restricted user access: the ability to restrict the documents that specific users can see – by repository, folder or virtual folder.
• Administrator-only repositories: to restrict access to certain repositories to administrators only.
• Ability to download a marked-up “diff” when comparing documents in the “compare documents” tool.
• Support for WEBM video files.
• Search criteria for confidential categories.

Improvements

• Numerous improvement performances, including major improvements for very large projects (1m+ documents).
• Smarter detection of inline images in emails, resulting in fewer “junk” image attachments being extracted.
• Easier selection of parties in search tool.
• Better handling of huge text/CSV files.
• Improved display of pre-formatted plain text files.
• PDF documents with closed popup annotations are now flagged as having hidden text.
• A previously-unsupported PDF annotation type is now included in text extraction.
• Improved search-hit highlighting of non-standard characters.
• Improved search-hit highlighting for wordlist results.
• Improved handling of invalid EXIF data in image files.
• Improved detection of different kinds of Outlook meeting notifications.
• Fixed rare pane resizing bug.

In response to increased demand, we have also expanded our training capacity. We are frequently running training sessions for firms around the country. We provide free training for our customers, so if you would like to arrange a session for your firm please contact us.

Thank you as always to our valued customers for your support and feedback.

New features

• Browsing documents by email address now allows further browsing by role (From, To, Cc or Bcc)
• Linking email addresses to parties (authors & recipients): added an option for controlling whether to exclude CC and BCC recipients.
• New discovery review checklist checks:
  • Redundant emails;
  • Incomplete review tasks;
  • Non-privileged, non-redacted emails sent from legal domains;

Improvements

• A discovery review checklist can now be generated for a specific repository, folder or other set of documents, instead of for all client documents in the project.
• Exporting document information includes review task notes.
• Adding and removing of review tasks for documents is now recorded in affected documents’ history.
• Improved apparent duplicate email detection.
• Improvements to email disclaimer detection.
• “Hide junk image attachments” tool now includes PDFs (previously this feature only applied to native emails).
• Improved performance when processing PDF files with large number of fields.
• Processing of barcode-separated batch scans removes superfluous separator pages at the end of a batch scan.

Happy new year! We have a big todo-list of new features and improvements updates that we are already busy working on for 2021. In the meantime, here is a summary of recent new features and improvements.

Thank you as always to our great customers!

New features

• Virtual folders that a document is in are now shown on the document’s Info tab.
• Hidden duplicates of a particular document can be viewed via the Related tab.
• The search results page show the number of duplicates excluded by the “exclude duplicates” option.
• Inclusion of custom fields on “export to Excel” and discovery list reports.

Improvements

• The “Discoverable” workflow category is now separated into “Discoverable – partially reviewed” and “Discoverable – fully reviewed”.
• Improved ability to redact PDFs containing some internal errors.
• Improved ability to OCR PDFs containing some internal errors.
• Improved ability to detect OCR requirement for PDFs containing numerous small images.
• Improved handling of trivial OCR results.
• Improved handling of blank pages and non-text documents in compare documents tool.
• Added part-privileged redaction check to Discovery Review Checklist.
• Importing notes excludes duplicate notes.
• Improved handling of Zip files that otherwise cannot be opened due to over-length internal file paths.
• Better layout of discovery review tasks and notes.
• Incomplete tasks are displayed before completed tasks.
• Separation of incomplete and complete tasks on Discovery page.
• Various performance improvements.

We’ve been busy labouring this Labour Day weekend, to carry out a major upgrade of the LawFlow servers. This will allow us to keep up with the significant growth in our user base, and the ever-increasing average size of discovery projects.  It will also enable us to roll-out numerous new features that we have planned for the coming months and into 2021.

Thank you as always to our awesome customers! Keep an eye on this blog for news about further updates.

LawFlow – New Zealand’s leading e-discovery solution

We are continuing to work on a lot of new features & improvements to our LawFlow e-discovery system, and will continue rolling them out progressively. Here are highlights of the latest update.

New features

• New OCR system to improve the performance, robustness and usefulness of the OCR process.
• Hide emails by address tool (similar to “hide emails by domain sender tool” in the previous update). This allows hiding (or deleting) of all emails sent from selected email addresses.
• Ability to exclude a saved search from within another search. This makes it easier to create searches that exclude documents meeting specific criteria. So if you want to do a search such as “All documents in criteria A, but excluding any in criteria B“, you can create a search for criteria B, save it as say “Criteria B”, and then create another search with criteria A that also excludes the “Criteria B” saved search.
• Option to toggle additional columns (author, recipient, etc) in the left-hand slide-out pane in Details view.
• Ability to link multiple documents to chronology events at the same time via the tray.

Improvements

• Usability improvements to “link email addresses to parties” tool.
• Quick link for adding users added to home page.
• Improved detection of specific watermark text on PDFs.
• Improved no-content detection for vector-based PDFs.

Thanks as always to our great customers for your support and feedback.

New features

• Option to hide (or delete) emails from the same sender when hiding a document. This is useful for quickly removing ‘junk’ emails, e.g. spam, newsletters, etc from a particular sender when hiding one document from that sender.
• Hide emails by domain sender tool. This allows hiding (or deleting) of all emails sent from selected domains. This is useful for quickly removing ‘junk’ emails, e.g. spam, newsletters, etc from multiple particular senders at once.
• Search function added to redaction tool – this allows basic searching of text in the document being redacted.
• Ability to view the source duplicate of a list document when using duplicate placeholders. This makes it easy to see the source duplicate without having to navigate away.

Improvements

• Improved performance of the redaction tool for very long documents.
• Improved performance for redaction processing (i.e. generation of the safely redacted version of a document after confirming the redactions to make). Redacted versions of documents are now created over twice as fast as previously – typically now less than 1 second per page.
• Improved apparent duplicate email detection, including smarter algorithm for handling emails-as-attachments.
• Improved responsiveness of resizable panes.
• “Merge parties” tool now includes parties automatically created for mapping files (i.e. authors/recipients automatically created when importing another party’s document list information).
• Improved extraction of non-standard EXIF metadata properties from images.
• When viewing a list, “dupe” badge to indicated duplicates now only shows for duplicates on the same list.
• Various performance improvements.

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).