Search Overview and Examples

You can use Everlaw's Search page to build and refine document queries across your project. From this page, you can combine search terms, preview matching documents, and adjust settings that further control how, and which documents appear in your results (e.g. group or remove documents by type).

This article introduces the layout of the Search page and explains the core categories of search terms you can use, along with other introductory search concepts. It also links to reference and example articles for specific term types and advanced search workflows.

Requirements

The search page is available to all users on a project. The documents you can search may be limited by your document access permissions. Document access permissions are managed by Project Admins.

Access the Search page

To access the Search page, select the Project Search button in the toolbar.

The search page is made up of three main components (illustrated in the screenshot below):

• The query builder: This is where you build your search query using search terms and input
• Search terms: The terms you can use to search
• An instant search preview: The search preview shows your search logic, the number of document hits in your search, and a random sample of the documents meeting your search criteria. The preview results are generated in real-time and displayed while you build your query.

Add search terms to the query builder

To build a search, add the appropriate search term(s) into the query builder using one of the following methods:

• Drag-and-drop: Manually drag a term directly into the query builder

• Search: Use the Find a term search bar

• Pinned lists: Select frequently used terms from the pinned lists on the page's side panel

• Show more terms: Each category has a Show more terms button that will display a list of all additional terms in that category

• Keyboard shortcuts:

  • Press f to start searching for a new term

  • Press ? (Shift + /) to view the full directory of advanced search shortcuts

Available search terms

Searches are constructed from one or more search terms, allowing you to search on different document characteristics. The terms are grouped into five categories:

For a complete list of search terms and their definitions, visit Search Terms and Their Definitions.

Search term parameters

Some search terms allow you to search across multiple parameters. For example, when you use the Rated search term, you can search on the document’s rating status, who applied the rating, and when the rating was applied.

Example: "At any time" and "Current"

When you use a Review search term with a Date value, you can select the date range for when the review work was applied. You can also select for review work to have been applied At any time or Current:

• At any time: At any time in the life of the project, the document was the specified status. Every document that the Blue Team ever rated hot will be retrieved, regardless of whether or not the document is currently rated hot.
• Current: At the current moment in the project, the document has the specified status. Every document that is currently rated hot will be retrieved.

Negate search terms and operators

You can negate individual search terms and logical operators.

Negate a search term

To negate a search term, either:

• Click on the term name once, or
• Drag and drop a Not term from the left-hand sidebar over the term.
  Negating a search term will find documents that do not have that particular property. In the example below, after negating the search terms, you are searching for documents that do not contain the word “energy” and are not emails.

To remove the Not, click the term again.

Negate a logical operator

To negate a logical operator, drag and drop a Not term from the left-hand sidebar onto the logical operator to negate its contents. Negating a logical operator has different logical consequences from negating an individual search term. In the first example below, the user is searching for documents that are not sent from Ted Fick and were not sent during the time period 1/1/2007 to 3/14/2013. In the second example, the user is not searching for any documents that were sent from Ted Fick and were sent during the time period 1/1/2007 to 3/14/2013.

The first example will exclude more documents than the second. A document that was not sent during the time period 1/1/2007 to 3/14/2013, but that was sent from Ted Fick, will be excluded from the results of the first example and included in the results of the second example.

Flip a logical operator

To flip a logical operator to the other operator (e.g. And to Or and vice versa), double-click on the logical operator. In the example below, after switching the And operator to the Or operator, you are searching for documents that either contain the word “energy” or are emails.

Document deduplicating, sampling, grouping, and removal options

You can specify additional options for sampling, grouping, and filtering your documents by selecting Search settings.

This opens the Duplicates, sampling, and grouping settings dialog.

Search settings has up to four options:

• Duplicates among search hits: Exclude or include duplicates from your search results. This option may or may not appear, depending on your project settings.
• Sampling: View a random sampling of your search results by specifying Sample size (the maximum number of documents in the sample set)
• Grouping: Include document family members among your search results. You can group documents by attachments, email threads, chat conversation, email and chat conversations, exact duplicates, near duplicates, or versions.
• Remove from group: Depending on the grouping setting you have chosen, you will be able to further specify removal settings, including removing parent documents or search hits from your family results, among other options.

To read more about these search settings options, visit our Deduplicate, Sample, Group, and Remove Search Hits Via "Search settings" article.

Copy search terms

You can copy a term by dragging it to a new location while holding down your keyboard's Ctrl key (Cmd on Macs). A new term will appear with the same information as the original term. You can copy the logical And and Or containers in the same way by dragging on their bars; all of their contained terms will be copied as well.

Additional search examples

• Search for documents in a specific Bates range: Documents with the ABC prefix and Begin Bates from 50 to 10000
  
• Combine multiple search terms using logical operators: Documents rated “Hot” or “warm” by Byron that are not PDFs
  
• Nest logical operators to search for documents with distinct criteria: Emails that contain the word “energy” or hot documents coded “Responsive.” 
  
• Deduplicate across all documents that meet your search criteria: This option groups your documents with any exact duplicates that exist on the project, then removes any children from the groups, leaving only one copy of each document in your search results. 
  
• Pre-production quality assurance: Need to prepare document families for production while making sure that nothing has been skipped over during review? You can run a search for all documents, including attachments, that have been coded responsive, and have NOT been coded privileged.
  
• Combining Distinct Searches: For those who build complex searches, it can helpful to combine different searches to avoid having to input all search terms again in one search. In this case, use the Prior Search term under the Review tab on the left panel to pull up previous searches to build upon.
  
• Search and filter documents based on text file size: Search for documents based on a file size range in either kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB). This can be helpful for catching documents with text extraction errors after upload, for performing overlays, or for forcing OCR.
  To search for documents based on text file size:
  1. Select the Text File Size search term.
  2. Enter the numeral values in the term’s minimum and maximum fields.
     
  3. Select the unit size: KB or MB.