For more information on productions in Everlaw, please see the help articles in our Productions section.
General questions
Q: What are productions?
A production in e-discovery is the process of delivering electronically stored information (ESI) as part of legal discovery. It involves preparing, organizing, and formatting relevant data to meet agreed-upon specifications or court requirements. A production helps facilitate the secure, accurate sharing of documents while preserving metadata and evidentiary integrity.
For an introduction about how productions are handled in Everlaw, visit Overview: Creating Productions on Everlaw
Q: Do you have a production workflow guide?
Yes. Please see Pre-Production Workflow Guide and Best Practices.
Q. How much does it cost to run a production?
Running standard productions out of Everlaw is completely free, though any documents created via the production will be billed as normal processed data. If your production requires custom technical work, you might be charged for support at an hourly rate. We will always seek permission before performing any chargeable technical work.
Q. How are productions sorted?
By default, Everlaw uses filepath as the sort order for a production. Families will be grouped together, with the parent documents immediately followed by respective attachments in the Production Bates range, as child attachments are extracted from their parent. The children are also sorted by filepath within their family. You can adjust the sort order of your produced documents and choose additional sub-sorts in the production protocol wizard.
Q. Can I change the stamped message on produced documents?
Yes. You can specify what text you want stamped on your documents in the production protocol wizard.
Q. Will the Bates stamp on documents block or obscure any document content?
No. Bates stamps will not obscure document content. Additional space is provided on imaged documents for Bates stamps, ensuring that no document contents are blocked by the stamp.
Q. What documents are provided in a production?
The following document types are provided:
-
An image of each document, if you include images in the production protocol.
-
You can choose to format images as PDF or TIFF/JPG
- For PDF images, the production includes one PDF file per document
- For TIFFs/JPG images, the production includes one TIFF/JPG file per page of each document
- Withheld documents and documents produced only in native format always have a one-page placeholder, regardless of the image format
- The resolution of produced images is 300 DPI
-
You can choose to format images as PDF or TIFF/JPG
- One text file per document, encoded in UTF-8 (Unicode)
- One native file per document if you included them in the production protocol, and the file does not have a redacted, withheld, or excluded attachment
-
All of the following load files:
- .dat
- .opt
- .lfp
Q. What are the technical specifications of TIFF?
Multiple specifications are available, including single-page TIFFs, Group IV TIFF, and 300 DPI CCITT Group Four Compression.
Q. How do I migrate codes from pre-produced documents to the produced versions of those same files?
You can specify which review product to migrate from pre-produced to produced documents when creating a production. To find out more, go to the Additional Options section of the production help article.
Versioning
Q: Where can I find my produced documents?
Produced documents can be found through the versions context view, from the production card on the productions page or homepage, or through search. If your production notifications are turned on and you are included on the production notification recipients list, you will also receive a message in your Message Center with a small production card attached. Lastly, if you would like to see the Bates/control numbers of the original and produced within your results table, you can add the "Produced From" or "Produced To" columns. To learn more about creating productions on Everlaw, visit Overview: Creating Productions on Everlaw.
Q. Where can I find the original, pre-produced version of the documents?
Once the production is complete, a mapping file is created that links the produced documents to their pre-produced versions. This mapping file is uploaded to Everlaw, and the documents are linked through the versions field. The full version history of documents is viewable in the context panel. You can also search for the original documents using the produced search term in the query builder and checking the Original Docs option.
Redactions
Q. How do I redact text and metadata from a document?
To redact images, use the redaction tool to draw a black box over the area of the image you would like to redact. All redacted documents are OCR'd to ensure the text under the redaction is not provided.
To learn how to redact metadata, visit our Redaction article.
Q. Can I redact spreadsheets?
You can redact as many cells as you’d like from the native view of a spreadsheet, down to the individual cell level. You can then produce native versions of spreadsheets, without needing to image them, while still redacting sensitive information.
To learn more about redacting spreadsheets, visit Spreadsheet Review and Redactions.
Privilege logs and production logs
Q. How are privileged documents handled?
See the "Privilege" step of our Creating a Production Protocol article.
Q. Can I create a privilege log?
Yes. In the productions wizard, you can withhold privileged documents and then create a privilege log in a subsequent step. For more information, check out this section of our Creating a Production Protocol article.
Q. Can I create a production log?
There are two ways in Everlaw that allow you to create a list of all of the documents included in a production.
- When creating a privilege log, you can check a box that will include documents that are not marked as privileged. You will be able to customize which document metadata are included in the privilege log, and can even change which metadata displays, depending on the documents' privilege status.
- If you would like to maintain a privilege log that is separate from your non-privileged documents, you can also export a CSV list of documents when the production has completed. This can be done by running a search and using the Produced term to retrieve documents from a specific production. You can choose to retrieve the original, source documents of the production, or their produced counterparts. You can also choose to exclude documents that were marked as privileged. The following search, for example, will retrieve all of the documents used as the source for a particular production, except those documents flagged as privileged:
Once you have retrieved the necessary documents, click the Export icon and select CSV from the list of options. This will generate a CSV list of the documents that your search has returned. You can specify which metadata and review work you would like to include in your CSV export.
Production modifications
Q. What do I do if the document looks like it was produced incorrectly?
Please let your Everlaw contact know as quickly as possible.
Q. Can I modify a production if I already produced the documents?
Yes. Please visit Production Modification Tools to learn more about the various production modification tools offered on Everlaw.
Exporting productions
Q. What types of load files are generated upon running a production in Everlaw?
Five load files are generated when a production is run in Everlaw: DAT, OPT, DII, LST, and LFP.
DAT: This is a standard load file format. It contains all the document IDs and metadata.
These are the characters used to structure Everlaw-generated load files:
| Description | Character |
|
Column |
DC4 |
| Quote | þ |
| Newline | \r\n |
| Multi-value | ; |
| Nested value | None |
OPT: This load file contains links to the images that correlate to the document breaks in the DAT file. Because it's usually only provided for documents where images were created/provided, the total document count may be less than that provided in the DAT. OPT files are also commonly used in Concordance for importing images with specific document breaks.
DII: This is a load file that is typically used in Summation. It incorporates image and text paths and is not based on columns found in DAT files.
LST: This is a load file with two columns: DOC ID and TEXT PATH.
LFP: This is a load file typically used in Ipro for importing images with specific document/child break.