September 15, 2023 Release: Preservation-in-place for Microsoft 365, search improvements, and more!

Expected US Release: September 15, 2023

Expected International Release: September 22, 2023

Expected Federal Release: September 29, 2023

With this release, we’ve added preservation-in-place for Microsoft 365 data, search improvements, and more — read on for more information about the features coming out this month! If you would like to learn more about the features in this release, join us for a live training session.

User-facing features in this release:

• Legal Holds improvements
  • Preservation-in-place for Microsoft 365 data
  • Updates to people properties
• Contact names improvements
• Search improvements
  • Custom search operator for common search patterns
  • Improvements to Find-a-Term on the Search page
  • Improvements to searches for numbers in spreadsheets and phrases
• Upload processed data to partial projects
• View all custom redaction stamps
• Warning when promoting incomplete families in ECA databases
• Updates to Project Size page
• [Organization Admin] Parent organization reporting
• [Organization Admin] Additional user analytics in API
• Visual Improvement: Dropdown Menus

Legal Holds improvements

Preservation-in-place for Microsoft 365 data

Preservation-in-place for Microsoft 365 data, the first feature of several to come in a major revamp to Everlaw’s legal holds system, is now available in Everlaw databases!

You can now create, track, and release Microsoft Purview holds on custodian data within Everlaw. These new preservation-in-place objects are now displayed alongside hold notices pertaining to the same matter.

To set up a Microsoft hold in Everlaw’s legal hold system, users will need to create a data preservation.  

Each data preservation is defined by:

• a set of services (such as Microsoft or Google), 
• a set of custodians, 
• a query (including optional dates and keywords), 
• and a set of data sources within those services (such as Exchange mailbox).

Everlaw Legal Holds currently supports Microsoft 365 with available data sources including Exchange Mailbox, capturing emails and private channel messages stored in that mailbox, and OneDrive site.

To begin creating a data preservation, navigate to the Legal Holds page and click on the “+ New” button at the top right then select “New data preservation” from the dropdown.

From here, you will be prompted to log in to your Microsoft user account if you have not already done so. To leverage Microsoft data preservation, organizations must have access to Premium eDiscovery and users creating Microsoft data preservations will require Microsoft user credentials with eDiscovery Admin permissions. For more information on the Microsoft permissions required to use this tool, please visit this article.

Next, select an existing Microsoft Purview case in which the data preservations will be created, or create a new Microsoft Purview case. You can then select custodians from existing directories, manually add emails, or upload a list of new custodians from a CSV file. Finally, you will be prompted to define which custodian data to preserve by adding optional date and keyword queries and selecting data sources. 

Once the data preservation has been created, a card will appear on the main Legal Holds page. 

Selecting the “View” button on a data preservation’s card will take you to that data preservation’s summary page. To see the most recent status of the hold, press the “Sync with Microsoft 365” button. 

To see the status of the holds in Microsoft Purview, you can click on the linked name below “Case”. All custodians placed on hold will be shown here. However, in order to preserve accurate hold status reporting in Everlaw, changes to Everlaw-created holds should only be made in Everlaw.

From the Custodians tab in Everlaw, you can see the status of each custodian’s data source in a table format. From here, you can perform actions on subsets of custodians, including releasing active custodians, reactivating released custodians, or exporting reports.

Selecting a particular custodian in this table will bring up the custodian side panel, which is also accessible anywhere else in the legal holds environment, including in the directory and within a particular hold notice.

To see all recorded activity on the data preservation, including custodian statuses (successful, pending, or errored) at each sync event, click on the Activity tab. From this tab, users can also see who performed each action, filter by date, and export a report of all activity.

The “Release all custodians” within the data preservation, shown in the screenshot above, will release all custodians on that particular data preservation. If you want to release custodians from all hold notices and data preservations in the database, you can use the new “Release all” button on the main Legal Holds page.

Learn more about preservation-in-place for Microsoft 365 data here and legal holds on Everlaw here.  

Updates to people properties

The legal holds directory will now include the following additional people properties:

• Other emails
• Business phone
• Mobile phone
• Fax number
• Preferred language
• Office location
• Employee type

All of the additional properties are optional and can be stored for any number of people in the directory, including none.

In addition, the properties Address, Phone, and Employee status have now been removed from the directory. Information currently stored in the Phone property will be moved to Business phone property; Employee status to Employee type; and Address field to Notes.

Learn more about legal hold directories here. 

Contact names improvements

With this release, Everlaw will automatically group Contact Names based on a shared email address and the similarity of the Contact Names! This improvement reduces the number of duplicative Contact Names and better aggregates email information in search results. It will also be reflected in the Communication Visualizer. 

Learn more about Contact Names on Everlaw here. 

Search improvements

Custom search operator for common search patterns

Searching for common patterns on Everlaw has improved with the introduction of “smart expressions”! 

Smart expressions are an improvement to Everlaw’s built-in personal information pattern searching. These expressions allow for faster and easier searching of certain patterns of numbers, letters, and symbols. In addition, smart expressions have built-in checks to reduce the number of false positives that one might see when running searches based on regular expressions. 

As an example, when searching for instances of credit card numbers, you can now search for <credit-card>. This search will capture valid credit card numbers, regardless of whether they contain dashes or spaces. 

Additionally, you can use smart expressions to find specific instances of a common pattern. For example, if you are looking for phone numbers, you can search just for <phone>, but if you are searching for phone numbers that begin with a specific area code, you can use an equals sign to search for <phone=661*>. The wildcard in this search means that this search will return phone numbers with the area code of 661, regardless of if the form is (661) 555-1234, 661-555-1234, or 661 555 1234.

Changes to Persistent Highlights

Smart expressions will replace the existing regular expression searches found on the Persistent Highlights page. Existing persistent highlights will still remain on your project, but the name will be updated to reflect the fact that these are legacy terms using regular expressions.

We recommend updating your persistent highlights to smart expressions, as they are faster and return less false positives than the legacy personal information pattern searches. To update your persistent highlights to include smart expressions, navigate to the Persistent Highlights page of your project settings, delete the legacy terms, and add the new smart expressions from the Unused or “Add more region-specific personal information patterns” sections.

Learn more about smart expressions here. 

Improvements to Find-a-Term on the Search page 

The term finder on the Search page will now display recently used terms at the top for easier selection! When you click “Find a term” in the upper left corner of the Search page or use the keyboard shortcut “f,” you will now see a category for Recent above the other term categories.

In addition, when entering term values into the term finder textbox, you will now see search suggestions for select term values. Most document and review term values with exact text matches will be displayed as suggestions, but metadata term values will not be displayed. For example, if you enter the name of a binder into the term finder textbox, you will see a suggestion to run a search for that binder.

Learn more about Everlaw's search interface here. 

Improvements to searches for numbers in spreadsheets and phrases

Everlaw has improved how it indexes numbers, which improves searching contents of CSV (comma separated values) spreadsheets! Previously, entire rows were indexed as a single unit, and individual cells in each row were not searchable. Everlaw now splits numbers into individual units by commas, allowing values in each cell to be searched when running content searches.

These changes will be applied to any new documents uploaded after this release. Documents currently on the platform will be reindexed after the release. Please note that this process may take up to 4 weeks from release. In addition, note that Everlaw has a limit on indexing the first 100M characters of text for searching as well as a limit on viewing spreadsheets in the native viewer under 25MB in size.

 

Searching for comma separated numbers

This improvement means that numbers using commas to indicate the thousands separators will be indexed as multiple separate units for searching purposes. 

Therefore, you should: 

• Use spaces instead of commas in the search query for wildcards and fuzzy queries. 
• Quote the terms together as you might with a phrase. 

For example, if you want to search for numbers between 100,000–100,009, you will need to search for “100 00?” instead of 100,00?. 

Note that for exact number matches, there is no change and users can continue to search for documents containing text “123,456” with the query 123,456 as before, but this is now identical to searching for “123 456”. This may add false positives in certain cases and hit similar numbers with other special characters that are treated as space such as “123/456” or “123-456”. 

Non-space characters in phrase searches

Previously, non-space characters between words not encapsulated in quotes “  ” were parsed as spaces and worked as OR operators in content searches and hit highlights. Now, they will be parsed as part of phrases in search queries. 

For example, when searching for instances of the term “short-term”, leveraging the query short-term will no longer find instances of “short” or “term”. Instead, the queries short-term, “short-term" or “short term” will yield the same results. Using spaces in between terms and searching for short term will still function as an OR function for searching and finding results for either word.

Learn more about advanced content searches here.

Upload processed data to partial projects

You will now be able to complete processed data uploads directly from partial projects!  When uploading, use the new projects step to choose which projects to upload to.

Learn more about uploading processed data here.

View all custom redaction stamps 

Everlaw has two types of redaction stamps: project stamps, created by admin users; and custom stamps, created by individual users from the review window. In the past, custom stamps were only viewable by the user who created them, which often led to duplicative or nonstandard stamps.

With this release, when custom stamps are enabled in the project, all redaction stamps will be visible in the review window to all users with redaction permissions., Additionally, you will be able to apply custom stamps created by other redactors. 

Project admins will be able to view all custom stamps on the project in the Production Tools section of the General tab of the project admin page. Custom stamps will be listed alongside their abbreviation and the user badge of the user who created it. 

Finally, in order to reduce clutter on the project, all custom stamps not in use on any redaction on the project will be automatically removed from the project within 24 hours.

Learn more about custom redaction stamps here. 

Warning when promoting incomplete families in ECA databases 

Everlaw will now warn you when trying to promote incomplete families from an Early Case Assessment (ECA) project to a review project. Specifically, the warning will appear if you attempt to promote a parent document but not all of its attachments, or an attachment document without its parent and all other attachments.

The warning dialog, shown above, will contain links to two sets of documents.  

• Selecting the “4” will allow you to view the list of document(s) in the promotion set missing family members.
• Selecting the “18” will allow you to view the list of the missing document(s) themselves.

To include the detected missing family members in the promotion set, the user can simply select the checkbox in the dialog, then “Continue” to complete the promotion workflow.

Learn more about promoting documents in Early Case Assessment databases here.

Updates to Project Size page 

With this release, we’ve revamped the Project Size page under Project Analytics!

You will now be able to see: 

• The billable and current total size for the current month
• The billable and end-of-month total sizes for past months
• Size data disaggregated into monthly and daily views
• Platform events that resulted in a change in data size

Monthly Summary

The Monthly Summary section at the top of the page will display a snapshot of the current billable size and total size of the project, broken down by relevant sub-categories of data. 

• Billable size is only available in complete projects or ECA projects
• If you are looking at a past month, the total size at the end of the month will be shown instead of the current size

Events Table

Selecting “View events” in the monthly summary section will bring you to a table displaying size change events for a given month, including the event date, the associated user, the event type, and the resulting size change. Events can be further filtered by user or event type. 

Events of the same type, by the same user will be rolled up by 15 minute increments. For example, if a user generates 100 “Processed upload -image” events via a single upload within a 15 minute period, they will all be rolled up into a single event on the table. 

Clicking the export icon in the upper right hand corner of the table will generate a CSV export of the events for the month being viewed. 

Historical Size

The Historical Size section displays interactable and filterable graphs for: 

• Billable size at a monthly resolution, if the user is in a complete or ECA project

• Total size at a daily resolution

Exporting

You can export CSVs with billable (monthly resolution) or total (daily resolution) size data. These options can be accessed via the export icon in the upper right of the Project Size page.  

Learn more about evaluating your project using Project Analytics here. 

[Organization Admin] Parent organization reporting 

Parent organization reporting is intended for clients managing multiple Everlaw organizations and does not allow users to create new organizations. If your organization wishes to create new Everlaw organizations on the platform to utilize parent organization reporting, please contact your Customer Success representative.

Parent organization reporting offers centralized, aggregate reporting for clients currently managing multiple Everlaw organizations. Teams may choose to manage matters across multiple Everlaw organizations when they have subteams with different admins or distinct agencies, or when a single Everlaw organization does not provide a sufficient information access barrier. Parent organization reporting provides higher-level admins a centralized landing page to access sub-organizations and to view a report of data usage for all sub-organizations. 

You can enable parent organization reporting in the Security Settings tab of an existing Everlaw organization, or request to set up a new organization for this purpose by contacting your Customer Success representative or Everlaw Support. 

Once parent organization reporting has been configured from the desired Everlaw organization, it will become the "parent organization" and a "Sub-organization" tab will appear on the Organization Admin page. The Sub-organization tab is the only tab that will contain information pertaining to all sub-organizations. All other tabs in the left menu will still only contain information on the databases and projects owned directly by the parent organization and will not contain information from the sub-organizations.

From the Sub-organizations tab, all organization admins of the parent organization can add other organizations that they also currently administer as “sub-organizations.” Once added, all sub-organizations will be displayed in the table alongside information on the number of databases, projects, and users within each sub-organization. Clicking on the Organization Admin diamond icon in the table will navigate an admin to the Organization Admin page of the sub-organization.

All organization admins of the parent organization will be able to access the Sub-organizations tab and view all linked sub-organizations in the tables. Note that if an organization admin of the parent organization does not have admin access to a sub-organization, they will still be able to see the aggregate information about the sub-organization in the tables. However, they will be unable to navigate to or access the sub-organization.

The second table within the Sub-organizations tab will display usage data for all sub-organizations with billable data. The default view of this report is aggregated by sub-organizations. If the parent organization itself has billable data, it will be displayed as a row in this table and will be included in the totals across the top of the page. Changing the view to by Database / Project will display all databases and projects of the sub-organizations and the parent organization.  The organization admins of the parent organization can export organization sizes, database sizes, or project sizes by clicking on the export icon above the table.

Learn more about parent organizations and sub-organizations here. 

[Organization Admin] Additional user analytics in API 

Everlaw’s API now includes additional user level information to support building flexible and custom analytics integrations at scale. Specifically, this improvement makes last user activity and user identifier information available in our API.  

Learn more about Everlaw’s API here. 

Visual Improvement: Dropdown menus

With this release, Everlaw will have visual improvements to Dropdown menus. Checkboxes are used as the visual indicator for multi-selection, replacing the previous orange highlight.