Search Overview and Examples

To access the search page, click on the magnifying glass icon in the toolbar.

Everlaw’s search interface features a visual drag-and-drop mechanism for building queries. While you are building your query, results are generated in real-time and displayed in the Instant Search Preview. 

There are three main components to the search interface:

• Search terms: The terms you can use to search. They are broken into Document, Review, and Metadata categories, as well as the logical operators you can use to connect terms. You can customize which terms are always visible to you by selecting Show all terms and then dragging and dropping the terms you'd like to have visible.

  

• Query builder: The visual interface to build your search
• Instant search preview: A preview showing your search logic, the number of document hits in your search, and a random sample of the documents meeting your search criteria

The search page also features a series of keyboard shortcuts, that you can access by pressing the "?" key (shift + /, on many American computers). 

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Add search terms to the query builder

To build a search, add the appropriate search term(s) into the query builder. There are four ways to do so:

• Drag-and-drop the term
• Select the term itself
• Find a term: Use the keyboard shortcut "f" or select Find a term at the top of the terms column. Then you can type in the term name and press enter to include it in the query builder. 
  • Type a text string to search document contents: If you type in a string of text when finding a term, you can opt to convert that search into a Content search. For example, if you wanted to search for the term "Enron" but didn't search for the term Contents, then Everlaw will suggest converting your search into a content search.
    
• Use keyboard shortcuts: You can add terms to the query builder and construct complex searches through using keyboard shortcuts. To access the full list, press the "?" key (shift + /, on many American computers) on your keyboard.

Available search terms

Searches are constructed from one or more search terms. Search terms are listed on the left of the search interface. Search terms allow you to search on different document characteristics. The terms are grouped into four sections: Logical (Boolean grouping properties), Documents (properties pertaining to the document itself), Review (properties pertaining to review product and review work), and Metadata. 

A full list of search terms, along with their descriptions, can be found here.

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.

• At any time and Current

When you use a Review search term with a Date component, 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.
Note: Current cannot be used when searching by a specific group or user.

Negate search terms and flip logical operators

You can negate individual search terms and logical operators. You can also flip logical operators from one to the other.

• 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.

• 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.

• To flip a logical operator to the other operator (eg. “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 tab in the lower right-hand corner of each logical container.

Search settings has up to four options:

• Exclude or include duplicates from your search results. This option may or may not appear, depending on your project settings.
• View a random sampling of your search results by specifying the corresponding percentage in the sampling text box. If you choose to sample 20% of your documents, each document in your search results will have a 20% chance of being included in the sample.
• 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.
• 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 the search settings tab, please see the corresponding article.

Copy search terms

You can copy a term by dragging it to a new location while holding the Ctrl (command on macs) key. 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”: You can ne

• 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, performing overlays, or forcing OCR.

To search for documents based on text file size:

1. 1. 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.