Context Panel: View and Batch Code Related Documents in Review Window

The context panel allows you to quickly identify, view, and apply review work to documents that are related to the document you are currently viewing. This can help you quickly navigate and review sets of related documents.

Table of Contents

• What is the context panel?
  • Navigate the context panel
• Apply the same review work to all documents within a context
• The duplicates context
• The attachment family and file path explorer context
• The email thread context
  • Extracted emails
• The versions context
• The Clustering context
• The chat conversation context
• The linked documents context

What is the context panel?

The context panel is a tool in the review window. It is used to quickly identify and navigate documents related to the one you are viewing. When you select a context, you can see all the documents within that context that are related to the current document.

The available contexts are:

•  Duplicates: Everlaw displays exact, email, and near duplicates in this context. To learn more about these different duplicate types, see this article.
• File path explorer: You can explore the parent folders, or directories, that contain the document you are currently viewing. If the document you are viewing is part of a family, you can also see the attachment family in this view. To compare differences across your near duplicate groups, use Difference Viewer. 
•  Email threads: If your document is an email that is part of a larger email chain, you can see other emails in the chain along with any attachments to those emails.
  
•  Chat conversations: Chat documents and attachments that collectively represent a complete chat conversation. Examples of a complete chat conversation include all SMS texts collected between two individuals and all the chats collected from a given chat space or room.
• Versions: You can see different versions of the document, if any (translated versions of foreign language documents, produced and pre-produced documents, etc.).
•  Clustering: You can see conceptually similar documents in this context.
•  Linked documents: You can see outbound links to and backlinks from from the document you are viewing

Note: If a user is subject to Document Access Management, documents they do not have access to will not appear in the context panel.

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Navigate the context panel

The context panel is located on the left side of the review window. From the context panel you can view any context that your document is included in and create a search of a specific context.

By default, the context panel is collapsed when you first open the review window.

• To open the context panel, select any of the icon buttons.
• To collapse the context panel, select the back ← button in the upper right corner of the context panel
• To undock the context panel, select the undock button. Undocking allows you to drag the context panel to another position in the review window

Within each context is a list of the documents in that context. Any parent document of each context is listed at the top. You can distinguish the status of documents in the context panel using the following convention:

Document	Indicator	Example
Document you are currently viewing	Blue background
Document you first opened	Bookmark icon
Document you have already viewed	Gray background
Document you have not yet viewed	White background

Select a document to pull up the content, metadata, and review information (codes, binders, etc.) in the review window. This allows you to quickly review documents related to the one you originally opened. Changing to a different context automatically switches the displayed content and information to that of the original document you opened.

You can create a new search based on the context you are currently viewing. Select the search button in the context panel.  This opens the group you are viewing as a search in a new window. Your current and previous searches are saved as search cards on the homepage, so you don't have to worry about losing your previous search.  

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Apply the same review work to all documents within a context

From the context panel you can apply the same review work to some, or all, of the documents in a particular context.

Required permissions: Context Panel Updates permission   

To apply review work to a context:

1. [Optional] Select documents to apply the group action to. To do so, select the three-dot menu in the top right of the context panel and choose Show Checkboxes. Deselect any documents that you do not wish to affect. You can also choose Select All or Select None.
   
   
   • To see any duplicates that may be included in the batch update, select Show # dupe(s). You can then choose to deselect or reselect them
     
2. Select Modify # docs. This brings up the batch coding panel. The panel is prefilled with the current coding status of the original document you opened.
3. Select review work to apply and/or remove.

   To add review work, click on it once in the body of the coding panel. To remove something, click on it twice. The labels appear in the in the summary at the top of the coding panel. You can visually distinguish the status of labels using the following convention:

   • Labels with a gray background will not be applied to the document(s) once the changes are executed and saved
   • Labels with white backgrounds and green text/outlines will be added to the document once the changes are executed and saved
   • Labels with white backgrounds and red text/outlines will be removed from the document once the changes are executed and saved
     
     
4. Once you are done selecting your combination of labels, select Apply to save your changes.  A notification will appear to let you know that your changes have been applied.

Note: Project admins can configure auto-code rules to automatically apply codes from certain categories to all documents in a certain context. You will know if auto-code rules have been set up for a given context if there is a sparkle icon on the context.

For more information about reviewing with auto-code rules, please see this help article

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The duplicates context

To view the duplicates context, select the duplicates icon. The duplicates context displays the exact, email, and any remaining near dupes of the reference document. 

The reference document is the document you originally opened and is displayed at the top along with a bookmark icon. Following that are the exact, email, and remaining near dupes, separated into their respective sections.

Each section can be collapsed or expanded by selecting the section header. Hovering over the info icon provides useful information about the different duplicate types.

Each successive duplicates category is (generally) inclusive of the ones above:

• Email duplicates include exact duplicates
• Near duplicates include, by default, both email and exact duplicates.

Documents can fall under multiple duplicates categories, but will only ever be listed once in the duplicates context panel. A document always appears in the most precise category.

For example, a document that is both an Exact duplicate and an Email duplicate appears in the Exact duplicates section. A document that is both an Email duplicate and a Near duplicate appears in the Email duplicates section. 

Remaining near duplicates displays the near duplicate documents that remain after this sifting process. It does not show documents that are exact or email duplicates. To learn more about duplicate types, please see this article. 

Documents in Email duplicates and Remaining near duplicates are further grouped by exact and email dupes. To expand a grouping, select the blue link with the counts of the documents in the group. 

The first document listed in Email duplicates is the most “complete” of the email dupe family. The most “complete” email dupe is determined by text, presence of date stamps and other metadata, and attachment count.

Documents in Remaining near duplicates are listed from most similar to least similar.

For near duplicates that have both grouped exact and email duplicates, the similarity score for the top document only applies to itself and its exact duplicates. Because email duplicates can be textually different, the grouped email duplicates may not share the same similarity score as the top document. 

Selecting Modify at the bottom of the context will, by default, select all documents in the duplicates context. You can select and deselect documents by: 

• Type (exact, email, near)
• Sub-group (exact and email dupe sub-groups)
  • Double click on the parent of a group to select or deselect the entire group. A single click will only select or deselect the individual parent document.
• Subsection (exact and email dupe subsections for a grouped set of near dupes)
• Individual document

Select the three-dot menu for additional options to expand/collapse subsections and groups, showin checkboxes, and document selections.

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The attachment family and file path explorer context

You can explore a document’s file structure in the review window using the file path explorer context. This is useful if, for example you review an email and find that it was a highly responsive and you want to view other emails that were uploaded along with it. 

• The path explorer icon looks like a folder for a document that is not part of an attachment family.
• The attachments icon (paper clip) is displayed for a document in an attachment family.

Select the path explorer icon to display your document among the other members of its subdirectory. 

If your document has multiple attachments, you can sort the attachments by name or file type.

To navigate through your document’s directory:

1. Select the navigation bar near the top of the context panel. This bar displays the name of the subdirectory that you are currently in. This prompts a menu that displays the entire file path for the document that you are currently viewing.
   • For a document without any attachments, the navigation bar displays the subfolder that contains the document you are viewing.
   • For a document with attachments (for example, an email with attachments) the subdirectory is the parent document itself.
     
   • The top directory corresponds to the custodian that was assigned upon upload to the dataset containing your document.
   • The next-level directory corresponds to the name your dataset was assigned when it was uploaded to Everlaw. Neither the custodian nor the dataset fields are present in your documents’ file path values, since they were not part of the dataset’s original file structure, but they are visible in the navigation menu so that you can explore various datasets linked to the same custodian.
2. Select a subdirectory name to be taken there, or navigate through parent directories by clicking on the up arrow .
   • You can also select the back arrow to return to your previous location.
   • You can select Go to original Doc to return to the document you were originally viewing.
   • Navigating to a parent directory will display the contents of that directory. This may be a list of documents or subfolders, or a mix of both. A button displays the number of documents it contains, or the number of attachments.
3. Select a subfolder or document family to display it in the context panel. 
4. If you have navigated through several layers of parent directories, drill down through the layers to return to the subdirectory that you were originally viewing. You can always navigate back to the document you originally opened by clicking Go to original Doc. 

Here are some additional tips to navigate the file path context:

• If a document has duplicates on Everlaw, [#] other paths will appear when you hover over that document in the navigation tab. You can select the text to view a list of the document’s duplicate paths, and select a path to view that copy of the document.
  
• If you open a subdirectory or document family that contains many folders or documents, you may see that the contents have been divided into groups. Each group is identified by an italicized bracket. The groups appear because the Context Panel is best equipped to display folders or directories that contain fewer than 100 items. If a folder or directory contains more than 100 items, an extra level of virtual directories is created, and the items are organized alphabetically or numerically into the directories based on their first character(s). These virtual directories will be indicated by helptext at the top of the directory list that indicates that your folders or documents have been grouped. When viewing these vitrual directories, you will be unable to search on the set of documents. Instead you will have to navigate to the parent folder to search for all documents in the folder.

Note: If a user is subject to Document Access Management, they will not have access to the file explorer context.

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The email thread context

To view the email thread context, select the envelope. Email threads are displayed in chronological order. The first email in the thread appears at the top, and attachments are grouped below their respective parent emails. The email or other document currently displayed in the review window is highlighted in blue. 

The email thread context also shows duplicate emails and their attachments. Duplicate emails are displayed underneath the original email and will say dupe by the Bates number. You can collapse or expand the list of duplicate emails by pressing the link at the bottom of the original document card that tells you how many dupes of itself exists.

 

Email branches: Each branch of the email thread is represented by a new indented line. To trace a branch in the email thread, hover over one of the emails in the branch. The entire branch is highlighted in yellow, emphasizing which emails in the thread are part of that particular email chain. Hovering over an email will also cause a pop-out to appear with additional information about that particular email.

Hide emails: To hide the emails in a particular branch, select the negative number displayed in the corner of the first email in that branch. In the example below, clicking on the “-2” will hide the two emails from Lindh and Jeff replying to Jeff’s original email.

Select “+2” to reopen the two emails in the hidden branch.

Inclusive emails: Inclusive emails are always marked with an Inclusive tag. Inclusive emails are the minimum set of emails that creates the most “complete” email content in the thread. Any emails with unique attachments are considered inclusive, even if the body text of those emails is encompassed by another email.

Users can view the entire email thread with only inclusive emails. This is a good way to review all the content of a thread without reviewing duplicative information. To do so, select Show inclusive emails only. 

When you page through multiple documents in the review window, the checkbox setting is saved. Thus, if you select Show inclusive emails only on one document and then move to the next document, the context panel will continue to display inclusive emails only.

Extracted emails

Everlaw detects and displays the existence of “extracted emails.” “Extracted” emails are emails that appear somewhere in the body of the email chain, but were not produced as standalone documents in your document set.

For example, let’s say Randy emails their team, and that email is produced.

Jo replies all to Randy's email, but that email is not produced.

Sarabeth then replies to Jo’s email, and that reply is produced.

Because the content of Jo’s email is present in the produced version of Sarabeth's email, Everlaw knows of its existence, and displays it as an extracted email.

Below is an example of an extracted email:

In the example above, the email preceding Sarabeth's message to Randy was not produced, but its content is present in Sarabeth's email.

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The versions context

You can access the versions context by clicking on the clock icon. The versions context allows you to pull up different versions of the same document. This can include pre-produced and produced versions, original and translated versions, etc. You can see a count of the total different versions of a particular document by looking at the number below the versions icon.

When you produce documents on Everlaw, your original and produced version can be viewed here as well. For more information on producing your own documents on Everlaw, view our production articles. 

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The Clustering context

In the Clustering Context, you can see all documents predicted to be conceptually similar to the document you’re viewing in the review window. To view the Clustering context, select the Clustering icon . 

Clustering works by using TF-IDF to determine the relative frequency of words and metadata across all documents in your database. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is then used to simplify and reduce the number of comparison points across all of these words. The output of this method produces “nearest neighbors,” which are all of the documents considered most conceptually similar to the one you’re viewing. 

By default, the top ten most similar documents (by relative term frequency) are listed in the Clustering context. Select Show more documents to reveal the next ten most similar documents. 

To can run a search for all Clustering neighbors, select the magnifying glass in the context panel. Note that Everlaw does not currently support the ability to sort by similarity to the origin document in the results table.

Select Show origin document in Clustering to go to where that document is visualized on the Clustering page. The document will be selected and you will be zoomed in to the respective area on the Clustering page. 

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The chat conversation context

The chat conversation context shows all chat documents (also called "chat segments") and attachments that collectively represent a complete chat conversation. Examples of a complete chat conversation include all SMS texts collected between two individuals and all the chats collected from a given chat space or room.

Chat documents are displayed in chronological order, with attachments appearing under the document they are associated with. You can use this information to:

• See and navigate to all chat documents and attachments in a given chat conversation family
• Batch code all or a subset of chat conversation documents

To show or hide the document checkboxes, click the three-dot menu icon in the upper right of the panel.

Note: Chat conversation grouping is only available for data uploaded after Release 104 (February 27, 2024 for AU customers and March 1, 2024 for all others). Native chat data uploaded prior to this release can be reprocessed to work with grouping functionality. The original container file for a chat must be reprocessed, not the individual chat files. Processed chat data can be mapped to the fields used for grouping following the steps outlined in this article.

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The linked documents context

A common ediscovery challenge with modern communication is documents often include links to cloud-hosted documents or objects as references. For example, an email might ask the recipient to add suggestions to a draft contract and link to a Google Doc. These are uniquely different from attachments because they are not contained within the email or document itself. Instead, they’re stored somewhere else like Google Drive or Box.

Links may be challenging to work with since it is not clear from the link itself whether there is a corresponding document in the database. This makes it hard to understand the context of the conversation and perform an effective review. Everlaw’s linked documents context meets this challenge by making linked document relationships easier to understand and follow during review for processed and natively uploaded documents. 

The linked documents context displays two types of links:

• Backlinks: Links to this document from others. Backlinks identify that there is a document that references the document you are viewing via a link. Only documents collected through an Everlaw connector will show backlinks. Backlinks will only ever appear if the originating document is included in your database.
• Outbound links: links from this document to others. An outbound link signifies that the text of the document contains a link to a cloud-hosted document. If the referenced document has also been collected through an Everlaw connector, then the document is viewable. If not, then missing reference represents the linked document.

In this image the Box, Google Meet, Sharepoint, and Zoom Room links identified do not have an associated document on the platform. The Google Drive link does.

 

When identifying links, the platform captures a unique identifier associated with the document and the application. When collecting the referenced document through a cloud connector Everlaw will identify the unique identifier and use it to link the two documents. This means that even if documents are uploaded at different times, the links will still be recognized. Everlaw will identifies links from:

• Google Drive
• Google Vault
• OneDrive
• Sharepoint
• Box
• Jira
• Asana
• Zendesk

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