Create Assignment Groups

Individual assignments are organized into assignment groups. Assignment groups allow the users administering them to assign and oversee multiple batches of documents (i.e. assignments) at once. 

For example, your review team may want to perform a first pass review of documents in your project, and then follow up with a second pass review of those documents. If so, you could create two assignment groups on your project: a First Pass Review group and a Second Pass Review group. Each assignment group (i.e. First Pass Review and Second Pass Review) might have multiple batches of documents (i.e. assignments) that are assigned to different users on your project. The administrator of each assignment group administers all assignments in that group (e.g. sets batch size, assigns specific users, determines review criteria). 

Requirements

• To create and/or modify assignment groups, you must have Assignment group Create permissions

Assignment group permissions

While all users can receive individual assignments, only those with the proper permissions can access assignments groups (i.e. the administrative dashboard controlling multiple assignments). You can read more about configuring feature permissions in our User Groups and Project Permissions article.

The following assignment group access permissions are available:

• None: You cannot access or have assignment groups shared with you
• Receive: Other users can share assignment groups with you, with either View or Allocate, Share, and Delete permissions on the specific assignment group.
• Create: You can create and administer your own assignment groups. Others can also share assignment groups with you.
• Admin: You can view and administer all assignment groups on the project

Create an assignment group

When creating an assignment group, you will go through the follow high level steps:

• Step 1: Open the assignment group wizard
• Step 2: Establish Inclusion criteria
• Step 3: Name (or select) the assignment group
• Step 4: Select review criteria
• Step 5: Choose reviewers
• Step 6: Configure additional assignment group options
• Step 7: Allocate
• Step 8: Send

Step 1: Open the assignment group wizard

You can create assignment groups from three locations (instructions for each are listed in this step):

• Option 1: Start from the Assignments Group page
• Option 2: Start from your home page
• Option 3: Start from a results table

Option 1: Start from the Assignments Group page

To create an assignment group from the Assignments Groups page:

1. Go to Project Management > Assignment Groups.
   
   This opens the Assignments Groups page
2. To create a new assignment group, select + Create New.
   
   This opens the Create new assignment group dialog, which will walk you through the creation of your assignment group.
3. Continue to Step 2: Establish Inclusion criteria of this article for more instructions.

Option 2: Start from your home page

To create an assignment group from the home page:

1. Select the new assignment button next to the Assignments header.
   

   If you don’t have any assignments for which you can self-assign documents, you will be taken to the assignment group creation dialog on the Assignments Groups page. 
   If you do have the option to self-assign documents, a menu will appear. Select [Create new assignment group] and you will be taken to the Assignments Groups page where you can create your assignment.
   

2. Continue to Step 2: Establish Inclusion criteria of this article for more instructions.

Option 3: Start from a results table

You can create a new assignment group or add documents to an existing static assignment group with the documents retrieved through a search:

1. Build your search.

2. Go to the associated results table. Select Batch from the results table toolbar. Then choose Assign. 

   Note

   To create a dynamic assignment group, you must add all documents in the results table. adding only a subset will create a static assignment group. To learn about static vs dynamic assignment groups visit Introduction to Assignments.

3. A wizard will walk you through the creation of an assignment.
   Continue to Step 2: Establish Inclusion criteria of this article for more instructions.

Step 2: Establish Inclusion criteria

Whether you began creating your assignment group from the Assignment Groups page, the results table, or the home page, you will be directed to an assignment group creation wizard.

Here you must first establish your inclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria determines what documents will be included in your assignment group.

1. In the Create new assignment group dialog, use the search query builder to select your inclusion criteria.
   
2. Select Next.

Step 3: Name (or select) the assignment group

Next, you will be prompted to name the assignment group.

To create a new assignment group:

1. Enter a name in the assignment group name field.
   
2. Select Next.

If you started creating the assignment group from the results table, you can alternatively add the selected documents to an existing static assignment group. You can only add documents from the results table to existing static assignment groups and not to existing dynamic assignment groups since dynamic ones automatically add documents based on their inclusion criteria.

To add documents to an existing static assignment group:

1. Select the assignment name from the dropdown list.
2. Select Next.

If you are creating an assignment from the results table, this step will include an additional option to add the selected documents to an existing static assignment. You can also use the input box as a text filter to find existing assignment groups by name.

Step 4: Select review criteria

If you are creating a new assignment group, you will need to confirm or change the review criteria. These are the conditions that the documents must meet to be considered reviewed.

In most projects, the default review criteria is Any Rating, meaning documents that have been rated in any way will be considered reviewed. However, project administrators may change the default review criteria in Project Settings.

In this step, you can change the review criteria to something other than the default for this assignment. Once the review criteria has been changed, the summary text on the left of the wizard will change to Custom.

Once you are satisfied with the selected review criteria, select Next.

Step 5: Choose reviewers

Next, you can optionally choose which reviewers you want to assign documents to. Alternatively, you can choose to skip this step, and leave all the documents unassigned within the assignment group.

Select users or user groups from the Select users list. When selected they appear in the Users to receive assignments list.

When you're ready to continue, select Next.

Step 6: Configure additional assignment group options

Next, you need to configure several options for your assignment group. You must decide:

• How the work in the assignment group should be allocated between reviewers by either:
  • percentage of page count, OR
  • number of documents
• Whether or not the assignment group is dynamic or static
• Whether a specific review window layout should be used
  

Step 6A: Split assignment group based on

Decide if you want to split your assignment group based on Pages or Documents:

• Pages: You allocate assignments based on the percentage of pages in the assignment group. This options allows you to ensure each reviewer gets roughly the same number of pages to review, even though documents might very in length. For example, one reviewer might get assigned just a few very long documents, and another could get assigned many short documents, because each assignment is a similar number of pages total. Documents are never split upon assignment; each reviewer is always assigned full documents.
• Documents: You allocate assignments based on the number of documents. If your documents are roughly the same length, assignments with the same number of documents will have a similar amount of content to review. 

Step 6B: Set assignment group type

You must also decide whether or not the assignment group is dynamic or static (click here to learn about dynamic vs static assignment groups). If you have a dynamic assignment group, the search criteria you used to pull up the set of documents will be called your “inclusion criteria” for that assignment group. If your inclusion criteria for a dynamic assignment group includes inclusion in a binder and you intend to give reviewers the ability to self-assign documents, the relevant binder will need to be shared with the reviewers. Otherwise, reviewers will not be able to assign themselves documents. If you are choosing a static assignment group, or do not intend to allow reviewers to self-assign documents, you do not need to share any binder that is part of the assignment's inclusion criteria. 

The inclusion criteria can be changed later from the assignment admin dashboard.

Step 6C: Add a default review window layout (optional)

You may also choose to add a default review window layout for the assignment group. A user who is part of the assignment group (whether initially specified or added to the group later) is given access to the default layout for that group, and will see the specified layout when they first open their assignment from their assignment card. (If you choose not to add a default review window layout, reviewers will see their last used layout instead.) 
You can access the options for a default review window layout for the assignment group by clicking on the dropdown menu at the bottom of the assignment group creation window. When viewing and updating the assignment group, you can (re)set a layout as the default layout for this assignment group. New assignments and in-progress assignments would then default to the newly specified layout.

A reviewer is ‘in’ an assignment and sees the default layout for that assignment if:

• The reviewer has accessed the assignment by clicking on a My Assignment card on the home page.
• The reviewer has accessed the assignment by clicking the View unreviewed documents button from a My Assignment card on the home page .
• The reviewer has accessed the assignment by clicking on the assignment card of an assignment shared with them via platform message.
• Refining a search from any of the above.

While completing the review work of an assignment, a reviewer can still edit the layout, or load a different layout, if desired. This then becomes the layout that they see. However, if the default layout for the assignment group is changed, then the next time the reviewer opens the review window, they’ll see the layout currently specified as the default for the assignment group.

Step 7: Allocate

On the Allocation step, you decide the size of each initial assignment:

• If you chose to assign by pages:
  On the allocation step, you determine how you want to allocate the assigned documents as a percentage of the total page count. By default, the pages are allocated evenly among the chosen reviewers, but you can input an arbitrary percentage for each respective reviewer. Note that Everlaw will adjust the allocation to ensure that documents stay whole.
  
  If you want to keep a percentage of the pages unassigned, allocate the percentages such that the total assigned to reviewers is under 100%. If you update your assignment group to allow self-assignment, reviewers can claim batches of any unassigned documents.
  
  On the user table in the allocation tab you are also provided with high level information about a given user’s progress through any and all of their existing assignments. Hovering over the progress badge will provide more information, such as the total number of individual assignments the reviewer has, and the total number of documents they’ve reviewed out of the total assigned to them.
  
• If you chose to assign by document:
  The options for assigning by document are very similar to splitting by page, except that in the last step instead of allocating percentages, you can assign an exact number of documents for each reviewer.
  

Step 8: Send

On the Send step, you can optionally write a custom message to send to the assignment recipients. This message can include details about the assignment and your expectations for review. 

If you don't want to write a message, leave the default message as-is. When you're ready to send out the assignment, select Assign.

This starts a task to generate the assignments. When it's done:

• You'll receive a popup notification alerting you that it is generated
• You, and everyone with Admin access on Assignment Groups, will have a new assignment group card in the Homepage Assignments column
• Users receiving an assignment will get an email notifying them of the assignment and a message in their Everlaw message center. The message in the message center will include the custom message.
• Users receiving an assignment will have an assignment card on their homepage

Respecting document groups and sort order when assigning documents

If a document group setting is specified when creating an assignment group, the allocation of documents will respect document family relationships. Document group settings (e.g. group by attachments) can be specified whether creating assignment groups from the Assignments page or from the Results Table.

This means individual assignment cards might not include the exact number of documents you specify when you create the assignment group. For example, there might be an attachment family of 15 documents. If the inclusion criteria is grouped by attachment and  you create an assignment group with 10 documents per assignment, one assignment card will end up with 15 documents, because the attachment family is always assigned together.  

To preserve the sort order of documents, you will need to create the assignment from a results table using the Batch > Assign function. You cannot set a sort order when creating an assignment group by using the Create new option on from the Assignments page, where the document sort order will be defaulted to Bates number instead. 

You will not be able to change the sort order once an assignment group has been created. All documents added to the assignment will be in the same sort order established originally. For example, if you want the allocation of documents to respect attachment families and be sorted by Date Sent, group the results table by “attachments” and sort by Date Sent before creating an assignment group . 

Let’s walk through how this ordering impacts documents added to an assignment group at a later time. If you have grouped or sorted your documents by Order A when initially creating your assignment group: 

• Any documents that are later added to that assignment group’s unassigned document pool will follow Order A when they are eventually assigned to a user. This is true even if those documents were grouped or sorted by Order B before being added to the unassigned document pool. 
• If, however, the additional documents are assigned to a user directly (rather than first being added to the unassigned document pool), the documents will follow Order B.

Dynamic assignment groups

Dynamic assignment groups allow you to specify an inclusion criteria.  As review progresses, all documents matching that criteria will be automatically added to the assignment group.  

When choosing to create a dynamic assignment group, any unassigned document that no longer matches the inclusion criteria will disappear from the assignment group. If you want all the documents matching your inclusion criteria at the time of the assignment group creation to be reviewed, you should assign out all the documents during this step as a precaution.