Using Hit Highlighting to Search Within Documents

Hit highlighting allows you to quickly locate important words or phrases in the document you are currently viewing. Hit highlights are available in the review window's Native viewer for all document types, including spreadsheets.

Requirements

Specific permissions are required to view or create hit highlights. The permission types are:

• None: No access to highlights
• View: View all highlights
• Create: View and Create highlights (can only modify highlights you created)
• Admin: Full permissions on all highlights

Types of hit highlights

There are three types of hit highlights:

• Search Hits: Terms or phrases, if any, from the content search(es) used to retrieve the document. This can help guide you to relevant sections of the document.   
• Custom Hits: Highlights that can be added by you, the reviewer, as you review documents. Unlike search hits, they are not dependent on the underlying search that got you to the document, and unlike persistent hits, they are not pre-defined by a Project Admin. These are useful for finding contingently important information in the document you are viewing.
• Persistent Hits: Highlights set up by Project Admins that appear for all users in the project. These are useful for creating a standard set of important words or phrases across a project.

Limits

Hit highlighting for large text files only shows hits from the first 5MB. To locate content later in large documents, download the Text file and search through it offline.

Hit highlighting on an image is only supported on images with embedded or searchable text. For example, file types such as TIFs, PNGs, or JPGs do not support embedded text and therefore do not have hit highlight supported, but you can reprocess the image to create a searchable PDF. Please see Reprocessing Everlaw and Non-Everlaw Processed Documents for more details. 

Access hit highlights

To view and use hit highlights in a document:

1. Open the document in the review window.

2. Select the form you want to view the document in (e.g. PDF, Text, etc.). 

   Note

   If the image of the document is not a PDF with extractable text, the hit highlighting panel will only appear in the Text view.

3. Select the review window's Hit Highlights tab.
   If this tab is not visible, you can add it by customizing your layout.

Each of the highlight types — search hits, custom hits, and persistent hits — have their own subsection in the panel, respectively. Hits may appear on any page of the document you are viewing, and you may be taken to different pages of the document as you navigate through the hits.

Search hits

Search hits are terms or phrases, if any, from the content search(es) used to retrieve the document.  They are displayed in the first section. Each term or phrase in the search hits section corresponds to a search that retrieved the document.

To jump to the previous or next instance of a particular hit, select the left or right arrows next to that hit.

Custom hits

Custom highlights can be added by you, the reviewer, as you review documents. Unlike search hits, they are not dependent on the underlying search that got you to the document, and unlike persistent hits, they are not pre-defined by a Project Admin.

These are useful for finding contingently important information in the document you are viewing.

Create custom hits

At any point during review, you may create your own custom search terms that you wish to be highlighted.

To create a custom hit:

1. Open a document's review window.
2. Select the Hit highlights tab.
3. In the panel's Custom hits section, type your custom term into the Search document input field (or select one of the optional PII terms), then hit Enter on your keyboard.
   
    
4. The term is added to the Custom Hits list.

Pin custom hits

Custom hits exist in two states:

• Pinned hits (default): Are retained for every document you view in the project.
• Unpinned hits: Are only searched for in the current document and will disappear once you move on to a new document.

To pin or unpin a term:

1. In the Hit highlights panel, select the term to open its options panel.
2. Select the pin button.
   

Persistent Hits

Project Admins may want the same term, or set of terms, to be highlighted for all reviewers in that project. In this case, they set up persistent hits, which are visible for project users from the review window. These terms appear in the review window's Hit Highlights panel under Persistent Hits.

Unlike the search hits and custom hits, persistent hits are only displayed in a document's review window if they are found in the document. For example, if “energy crisis” is a persistent hit in your project, but the phrase does not appear in the document you are currently viewing, it will not appear in the persistent hits section.

Categories and terms

Persistent highlights search terms are grouped into categories. In general, we recommend to Admins that conceptually-related highlights should be grouped together, as this will make it easier for reviewers to navigate through, distinguish, and make sense of the different content hits that might appear in a document.

Terms in the same category share the same color and are also listed together in documents’ review window’s hit highlighting panel.

Select a persistent hit category to expand it and see each individual term that has hits in this document. 

Persistent highlight search terms are not restricted to a single category. This allows you to evaluate terms within the context of other terms.

If you cycle through highlighted terms in the review window, each term appears with the border color of the category they are cycling through. For example, in the screenshot below, the term “destroy” belongs to two categories but is hit when we cycle through terms in the green “Misconduct” category. The highlight border is green to match the category.

Redact using hit highlights

Required permissions: Create or Admin permissions for redactions

You can redact either single all instances of a term from a document's review window's Hit Highlights panel.

Most documents are redacted from their PDF view, with the exception of spreadsheets and media (video and audio) files, which can be redacted from their native views.

To redact a single instance of the term:

1. Use the arrow buttons to navigate to the instance you want to redact.
2. Select the term to open its options panel.
3. Select the Redact current instance button.
   

To redact all instances of the term: 

1. Select the term to open its options panel.
2. Select the Redact all instances button.
   

Redaction settings

By default, redactions are set to have no redaction stamp and full redactions. Both the redact current instance and the redact all instances buttons apply redaction stamps and partial redactions according to the redaction options.

Select the settings button to view/edit your current redaction options for stamps and partial redaction format when applicable.