Projects

Work on Everlaw begins by creating and naming a database, which is the umbrella source for one or more projects.  A project is the user-facing environment where review work takes place. 

Each new project includes "clean" versions of your documents that do not contain any of the review or work product accumulated in any other projects within them. You can create unlimited projects within a database at no additional cost.

Projects let you create a separate environment for an outside expert reviewer, without redoing a bunch of work in your database. A reviewer can go into their project and perform review on some or all documents in your database, without ever seeing the review product on documents in the other projects.

You can use this article to understand projects on Everlaw and learn how to create new projects within a database.

Requirements

To create a project on Everlaw, you must be a Database Admin or Organization Admin. 

To turn a project into a complete project, you must be an Organization Admin.

To access a project, a Project Admin must add you as a user. Your permissions on the project are determined by the permissions granted to the user group to which you are added. Learn more in our User Groups and Project Permissions article.

Complete and partial projects

Each new database automatically includes one accompanying complete project. Complete projects contain all documents in a database. Partial projects can contain all or a subset of the documents in your database.

You can create more than one project per database, and each one is treated as a separate matter.

Create a new project

All databases are created with a default, complete project that automatically contains every document loaded into the database, but you are able to create additional projects within the database.

When you create a project, you can choose to create one entirely from scratch, or use an existing project as a template.

To create a new project:

1. Go to Project Management > Database Settings.
2. Open the Overview tab.
3. Select + Add new project.
   
   This opens the New project dialog.
4. In the Name field, enter a name for your new project.

5. [Optional] In the Copy settings from an existing project field, you can choose to copy settings and users from a template project. To do this, select a project to use as a template from the list.

   Tip

   Using pre-configured project templates can save you time when you are setting up a new project.

6. Select Create.

Use a template to create a new project

Required permissions: You must have Project Admin and Database Admin permissions on the existing project, or be an Organization Admin. Organization Administrators who use a template are added to the new database and project as administrators for both the project and database.

When you create a new project, you have the option to use an existing project as a template.

The table below shows the settings that can be copied over from a template project. Deselecting any checkbox will prevent those settings from transferring to your new project.

Settings / objects that can be copied over

Objects that are not copied over from a templated project

These objects are not included in your project template:

• Binders, Stories, Drafts, Depositions, user assignments, or batch tasks
• Anything that depends on an excluded object or setting (e.g. if your protocol includes a privilege rule defined by a binder, the protocol will not be copied over)
• Project messages
• Analytics
• Productions and uploads
• Custom redaction stamps
• Views that are not public (Views that are shared with "All users" on a project are considered public views)
• Full screen review layouts that are not shared
• Searches in a homepage folder, and/or QC checks, that use any of the following terms: 
  • Bates/control
  • Attachment group size
  • Billable size
  • File path
  • Languages
  • Has access
  • Highlights
  • Notes 
  • Predicted
  • Prior search

  • Redactions

    Note

    The Redactions term can be included in templated production protocols. See the section below for more details.

  • Storybuilder
    In both cases, this is because these terms are dependent on information in the existing project that is not copied into the new project.

Once created, you can modify settings, users and their permissions, and objects to your liking in the new project.

Templating production protocols

Production protocols often include queries to identify specific document sets (e.g. a search to identify documents coded Privileged). When a protocol includes a search that is excluded from the template, the entire protocol is not copied over. For example, if the privilege rule for a protocol includes a search for a specific binder, the entire protocol will not copy over with a template because binders are not included with templates. We recommend that your template protocols are built to only include objects/searches that are included with a template so that they copy over. Then, you can further customize them in the destination project.

The Redaction search term has some specific nuance: the Redaction search term in a protocol will copy over as long as all the fields within it are also being copied, even though the Redaction term does not copy in other situations. However, if the Redaction term further specifies specific users or user groups that are not being copied over, then the entire protocol will not be copied.

If you plan to use the Redaction search term in a production protocol, you should build a template protocol with a generic Redaction term that doesn't specify users or stamps, and then optionally customize it to add the users once the new project is created. 

Add documents to or remove documents from your partial project

Required permissions: Project Administrator or Partial Project Document Management permission.

To add a document to or remove from a partial project:

1. Go to any results table. By default, all of the documents in a results table are selected. You can select only a subset of the documents using the checkboxes in the far left column.
2. Click Batch > Add to or remove from project. A dialog appears.
3. At this point, Everlaw checks whether or not adding or removing the selected documents will break an attachment group. If no attachment groups will be broken, Everlaw will skip this warning step (move to the next step now).
   However, if an attachment group will be broken, the dialog displays a warning identifying the affected documents and family members. From here:

   1. [Optional] To prevent this from happening, select include any missing attachment family members in this document set.

      Important

      Attachment groups can break when a user adds or removes incomplete attachment families to or from projects in the same database. We do not recommend breaking attachment groups, as their sizes are indexed on the database level, and broken families can lead to confusing search results in partial projects.

   2. Select Continue.
4. In the Select project field, choose the project you want to add/remove the documents to/from. Only partial projects are shown in the dropdown menu. 
5. In the Add or remove documents field, choose Add if you want to add the documents to a project or Remove if you want to remove them from the project.
6. [Remove only] If you are removing documents, confirm this action by selecting Confirm remove of documents 
7. When ready, select Add/Remove documents . 
   

You can navigate between projects by select the project name or the caret next to it on the top left corner of the screen and typing in the desired project name.

Once in the project, you can administer it (add users and user groups, set up categories and codes, etc.) via Project Settings. 

Rename projects

Required permissions: Database Administrator and Project Administrator

You can rename projects that you have admin permissions over. To do so:

1. Go to Project Management > Database Settings.
2. On the Overview tab, select the edit button next to a project’s name in the table. It appears when you hover your cursor over the project's row.
   
   This selects the existing name.
3. Enter the new name. 
4. Press Enter on your keyboard  to save the name.

The projects on the table are sorted by alphanumeric order.

Organization administrators are able to change the database name from the Projects & Users tab of the Organization Page. When they do this, the default complete project name will automatically change to match. If you have database administrator permissions and your organization does not have an organization administrator, you can reach out to support@everlaw.com to change the name of your database and default complete project.

[Organization Admin only] Convert a partial project to a complete project

You can have multiple complete projects per database. Organization administrators can convert a partial project into a complete one, if, for example, they want to add all documents in the database to the complete project and ensure all new documents get added to the project as they get uploaded.

To convert a partial project to complete:

1. Go to Project Management > Database Settings and navigate to the Overview tab.
2. Locate the partial project you wish to make complete, and select the three-dot menu
3. Select Convert to complete.
4. Confirm your decision by typing CONVERT in the resulting input box, followed by the project name.
5. A task will start in the Batches & Exports column in the project being converted. Once your partial project is converted to a complete one, all documents in your database will be added to your complete project.