Project Settings Metadata: Metadata Fields, Aliases, Editable Metadata, and Other Settings

Metadata is information about your documents that might not be visible or evident when you review the document. For example, metadata often includes information about the date a document was created and the name of the person who created it. It is useful for understanding your data, and some metadata fields have additional functionality to organize your documents, such as determining attachment groups. Everlaw offers flexibility on the metadata fields available to your team and how they are used.

This article describes how to use the tools on the Metadata tab of the Project Settings page. These tools allow Project Admins to:

• Determine which metadata fields are visible and searchable in the project
• Determine which fields (if any) are editable by users
• Create aliases that combine multiple metadata fields 
• Adjust the settings for functionality based on metadata, such as which metadata fields define attachment grouping

Required permissions: To access the Project Settings page, you must be a Project Admin.

Everlaw has three types of metadata: document metadata, aliases, and editable metadata. For an overview of how metadata is defined on Everlaw, and how it is viewed in the review window, see our Metadata Tab of the Document Review Window article. 

To access the metadata page, go to Project Management > Project Settings > Metadata.

Metadata fields

Document metadata fields are associated with documents during upload, either from a load file with a processed upload or extracted from natively uploaded documents. Example fields are Custodian, From, Subject, etc. Because they are considered part of the documents, these fields can never be deleted. They are always stored in the system, even if they are edited, and you do not need to worry about users overwriting them. 

The Metadata Fields table lists all the Document metadata fields present in the project, along with the format of the field. Use this table to add new fields, make fields editable, hide fields, or add them to aliases.

Hide a field

You can hide fields that aren't relevant to the needs of the project. To hide any particular field from users, select the eye  button for that field in the Show/Hide in project column and the eye will become crossed out. Hidden fields are not visible to users in either the search interface or the document review window. To unhide a field, select the crossed out eye .

In the example below, the "Application" field is hidden because it has a crossed out eye in the Show/Hide in project column. .

Create a field

While fields are usually created during upload, you can also add a new empty metadata field directly from the metadata page. Be default, these fields are editable so users can add values to them. To add a field:

1. At the bottom of the metadata table, select + Add metadata field.
2. A dropdown shows a subset of Everlaw’s primary standard fields. Select one or start typing to create a custom field name. If you create a new field, select it from the dropdown.
   
   
3.  Choose the format of the field. The format determines how the field can be searched — date fields will be searched using the date picker, etc.
   
   
4. Select Add.

Adding metadata fields is not necessary prior to upload.

Aliases

An alias is a view onto multiple fields. You may want to use a single consolidated field to span conceptually related fields, e.g.  a "Creator" can be a combination of the fields "From" and "Author". All the fields in an alias must be of the same metadata type. For example, you cannot alias a Time and Text field together.

Once you create an alias, you can search within that alias by selecting it as a metadata search term. When you search on an alias, Everlaw returns documents that match the search term on any of the aliased fields, regardless of their order. 

To create an alias:

1. Select the checkbox in the Add to alias column for the metadata fields you want to include.
   
   
2. Once you have chosen all the metadata fields to include, select + New Alias on the Alias section of the page. A text box prompts you to name the new Alias.
3. Type in a name for the alias and press enter on your keyboard.
4. Your new Alias, and its included fields, will appear. 

Once created, the alias is visible to all users who have the permissions to view the underlying fields.

Aliases cannot be added to other aliases as a field, but you can add another metadata field to an existing alias. To do so:

1. Check the box of the metadata field(s) you would like to add.
2. Click on the plus icon next to the alias name to which you would like to add the field(s).
   

Here are some additional tips for working with aliases:

• Click on an alias to expand it and view its fields.
  
• To reorder the fields in an alias, drag and drop the metadata fields to reorder them. Fields can always be alphabetized again with the Alphabetize button in the top row.
• The order of the fields in the alias determines how metadata appears within that alias. In the example below, the alias “People” contains the fields “In Reply To,” “Author,” and “Custodian."
  
  Below is an example of how three documents’ metadata would display in this alias. Note that the alias will prioritize whichever value is in the first field (in this case, “In Reply To”) for display. If a document’s “In Reply To” field is blank, the alias will display the value for the second field (in this case, “Author”), and so on.
  If you were to run a search for the People alias and the term “gwood,” documents with “gwood” in any of the aliased fields would be returned in your search, regardless of how the alias displays for that particular document.
• To rename an alias, select the edit button to the right of the alias title
• To remove a field from an alias, click the X to the right of the listed field. You will not see an X if a field has the same name as its alias, or if it’s the only field within an alias.
  
• Hide or show all the fields within an alias using the eye icons in the top row of the alias. 
• There is no way to hide an alias. For an alias to no longer be visible on the project, you can delete it using the Delete button. If you delete an alias, any searches that reference that alias will return zero results. Thus, exercise caution when deleting aliases.
• User groups must have at least View permissions on any and all aliased fields in order to view the alias. If the group does not have View permission on any underlying user field, they will not be able to view or search on the alias itself.

Editable metadata

Project administrators can make any metadata field editable by checking the field's box in the Make editable column. This allows users to edit the values of that field from the review window. This can be useful in correcting incorrect information in metadata fields or populating missing values. Edited metadata is specific to the project it was entered in and will not affect other projects in the database. See our article on metadata in the review window for details about how to edit metadata values.

Project Administrators can make fields not editable by unchecking the Make editable field on any currently editable field. When you make an editable field not editable, you can choose to keep any edited metadata values or to revert the metadata back to its original values. For more information, read our article on editing metadata. 

Project metadata settings 

Project metadata settings define the metadata fields used for the Primary Date field.

Primary Date field

Primary Date is an Everlaw smart search term that orders date fields in file type groups. This field populates the most relevant date field for a document based on the document's type. When building searches or sorting documents by date, you can use Primary Date as a date field with a relevant value for every document, regardless of type. This contrasts with other date field, like Date Sent, which will likely be populated for emails but not for spreadsheets or other document types.

When applicable, a document's Primary Date will be its first available date field in its file type hierarchy. All date fields beneath the first value will not be considered for Primary Date if a document has a value for the top one. Read more about Primary Date as an Everlaw Smart Term. 

 By default, Everlaw sorts the most relevant date fields on your project to the top of the file type group hierarchies. For instance, "Date Created" will default to the top of the audio, video, and image file type hierarchy, while "Start Date" and "End Date" will default to the top of the email, SMS, and chat file type hierarchy. This means that you can run a search for Primary Dates across multiple file types and collect documents with relevant date fields matching your search. 
 

Expand the file type group hierarchies and drag and drop fields to determine the list order.  To reset the sorted order back to the default, select Reset to default. Changes made in the order of selected fields are reflected instantly on your project.  

Database Metadata Settings

There are some metadata functions accessed in the Project Settings Metadata tab that function across the database.

Important: Project Admins can adjust settings in this section that affect all projects in the database. This is the case even if the Project Admin doesn't have database-level permissions or access to any other projects in the database. 

Display Text-extracted Metadata

When Display text-extracted metadata is enabled on your database, Everlaw attempts to automatically extract email metadata from the text of documents for which metadata is not provided. Typically, these documents are Bates stamped PDFs of emails that were uploaded as produced PDFs without a load file. Everlaw scans the first 40 non-empty lines to identify email headers.

Text-extracted metadata includes common email header fields like Subject, Date Sent, To, From, Cc, Bcc, etc. and behave like typical metadata fields once extracted. This setting is enabled by default.

If enabled after being disabled, a task will run to populate blank metadata fields if email header metadata is extractable from a document's text. This will apply to future uploads and may change some search results.

When Display text-extracted metadata is switched off after having been on, existing metadata values populated via this setting are removed, and future uploads do not have metadata extracted from them.

Attachment Grouping 

Document that you upload to Everlaw along with their attachments (often these are emails and their attachments) typically have metadata fields that connect them as members of the same attachment family for attachment grouping. During upload of both native and processed data, Everlaw automatically detects the appropriate fields and adds them to the Attachment grouping setting. This enables users to group their documents by attachment when building searches, make use of the attachment context during review, and define the context for auto-coding when an auto-code rule is in place.

If there is a field that you want to use to define attachment groups that is not listed in the Attachment grouping setting, you can add it.

To set the Attachment Groups:

1. Select the Metadata fields that represent an attachment or family group on the table. These will often have names like "Family Range," "Attachment Range," "Begin Attachment," or some related abbreviation (e.g., "FmlyRng," "BEGATT").
2. Select  Attachment grouping under Database metadata settings on the right of the page.
3. Select the blue plus (+) button to add the selected fields to the attachment grouping criteria. 
4. Once an attachment group has been set up, select Update to ensure that your data is now searchable throughout the project. Should you need any assistance setting up any project settings, please reach out to support@everlaw.com.

Note: When a field like BEGATTACH is present, there is often a corresponding ENDATTACH. Because Everlaw searches for documents with matching values in their Attachment Group fields, it is not necessary to put both BEGATTACH and ENDATTACH in the group. Using just one of them is enough.

Deduplication

By default, Everlaw uses the MD5 and SHA1 hash values to identify duplicates. Optionally, Admins can specify additional fields to use to identify duplicate documents. These fields must be at least 32 characters and able to be successfully decoded as a hash. To add additional fields or remove existing fields to the criteria for exact duplicates:

1. Select fields to add on the metadata fields table
2. Click the blue plus (+) button associated with the ExactDuplicates setting.
3. To remove a field from the criteria, click the “x” next to the field’s name.
4. Once the appropriate changes have been made, select Update to ensure duplicate identification is based on the new criteria.

Chat conversations

You can pull together chat conversations during search, review, and when coding documents. Everlaw identifies chat conversations using the following metadata settings/fields:

• ChatConversationId: Identifies chat documents that belong to the same conversation
• ChatConversationIndex: Identifies the order that documents should appear in a conversation
• ParentId: Identifies the container file that was processed to generate the chat documents

Documents must have a value for each of these fields to group together. To be identified as part of the same conversation, documents must have matching ParentID and ChatConversationId. Documents are sorted by their ChatConversationIndex.

These fields define grouping and auto-code for chat conversations. During native processing of chat data, Everlaw automatically generates and assigns the requisite metadata fields. Project Admins can modify the fields underlying chat conversations from the Project Settings > Metadata page. This is useful for mapping analogous fields from processed uploads to the ones used in Everlaw to identify chat conversations. To modify these fields: :

1. Select the metadata field(s) to add to a given chat metadata setting in the metadata table.
2. Select the plus next to the metadata setting.
3. Select Update once all the underlying changes are made.

In addition, you can map corresponding processed data fields to the Everlaw chat fields when uploading processed data or performing an overlay. Follow these steps:

1. In the type assignment step, ensure that the corresponding field for Chat Conversation Id is typed as Text and the corresponding field for Chat Conversation Index is typed as Number.
    
2. In the mapping step, ensure that the corresponding fields are correctly mapped to the Everlaw Chat Conversation Index and Chat Conversation Id fields. 
   

Email Threading 

Everlaw identifies email duplicates using email text content, metadata, and message IDs. You can change the metadata that is used to determine email threading by adding and removing metadata fields. To update the fields used for email threading:

1. Select the metadata field(s) to add to email threading the metadata table.
2. Select the plus next to the metadata setting.
3. Select Update once all the underlying changes are made.

If threading is currently in progress, the Update button will be disabled. If you need to edit your email threading metadata while rethreading is in progress, please contact support@everlaw.com. 

 

Raw fields

To view all raw metadata fields in your database and see the Everlaw field they are mapped to, expand the Raw fields section. Learn more about metadata on Everlaw.