January 5, 2024 Release: Inverse spreadsheet redactions, default binder sharing option, and more!

Expected AU release: January 3, 2024

Expected release for all other: January 5, 2024

With this release, we’ve added inverse spreadsheet redactions, default binder sharing option, and more — read on for more information about the features coming out this month! If you would like to learn more about the features in this release, join us for a live training session.

User-facing features in this release:

• Improved spreadsheet redactions: full sheet and inverse redaction options
• Default binder sharing option
• Support logical operators in hit highlights
• Standardize metadata timezone for document exports to ZIP and CSV
• Improvements to processing of Microsoft Team's exports

In addition, we also introduced the following features to the Everlaw AI beta in this release:

• Coding suggestions
• Batch summarization

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Improved spreadsheet redaction 

Redact Spreadsheet sheets

You can now redact entire sheets by selecting “redact sheet” from the redaction icon drop-down, or with the keyboard shortcut “Shift + r.”

Inverse spreadsheet redactions 

You can now also apply inverse redactions to native spreadsheets by selecting the “inverse redact” option from the redaction icon drop-down or with the keyboard shortcut “e.”

Once in inverse redaction mode, simply select the spreadsheet cells you wish to inverse redact. This creates a full-sheet redaction while keeping the selected content unredacted. Once a sheet already has a full sheet redaction, you may continue inverse redacting additional cells.

For overlapping redactions, you can only inverse redact within full sheet redactions.  To remove a non-full-sheet redaction, you must instead delete the redaction rather than using an inverse redaction. You may redact within a larger inverse redaction. For production purposes, the stamp on a full-sheet redaction takes precedence over other overlapping redactions with different stamps. Note that dependent redactions may cause redactions of dependent cells to appear within your inverse redaction selections when dependent redactions are enabled. To delete an inverse redaction, first exit inverse redaction mode. Then, select the trash icon that appears when selecting the inverse redaction.

All spreadsheet redactions are see-through when selected or in redaction mode. Redactions stamps will continue to display only when you exit redaction mode and the redaction is not selected. 

Learn more about spreadsheet redactions in Everlaw here.

Default binder sharing option

You can now share a binder when you create it, and project administrators can now set a default recipient for all newly created binders in a project. 

Project admins can configure the default binder sharing options in the General tab of Project Settings by selecting a default recipient and permission.

When project members create a binder with the project-wide setting configured, they can view the default recipients auto-populated in the dialog, edit them for that binder, or choose to keep the binder private by unselecting the “Share binder” checkbox. They may also write a message, send a notification without a message, or choose to share without notifying the recipients by unselecting the “Send notification to recipients” checkbox.

The project-wide binder sharing setting applies to new binders created from the homepage, in the batch coding panel, and in the review window coding panel. It does not affect existing binders that were created prior to configuring or changing the setting, and it does not apply to binders created during upload.

When the project-wide binder sharing setting is toggled off, you can share a binder during creation by checking the “Share binder” checkbox. This expands the dialog and allows you to select a recipient and permission.

The default binder sharing setting can be templated when creating a new project by copying settings from an existing project. For new projects created not using a template, the setting is toggled on with the default recipients set to the Administrators group with Edit permissions. For existing projects, the default binder sharing setting is toggled off by default. 

Learn more about collaborating with binders in this Knowledge base article.

Support logical operators in hit highlights

You can now use logical operators in hit highlights in the review window. This applies to hit highlights as well as batch redaction for document contents. For example, if you want to highlight the term “energy” only if the document contains either “california” or “public utilities commission”, the following hit highlight can be used: energy AND ("california" OR "public utilities commission")

This means that search queries using these logical operators highlight terms as expected when imported from search term reports.

If content search terms with a query containing logical operators are used, the corresponding search hits in the review window for those queries highlight hits that cause the document to be returned by the search query. 

 

The following logic is used to evaluate how queries with logical operators are highlighted in the review window:

For hit highlight queries that contain logical operators, they can contain expression that can be a term (“energy”), phrase (“hello world”) or subquery in parentheses ( (hello AND world) ). These are represented below generically as “A” and ”B”.

• A OR B, A || B: evaluate each expression before/after the OR separately 
• A AND B, A && B: evaluate each expression and highlight if and only if both expression are hits
• NOT A, -A: don’t highlight the expression A
• A NOT B, A -B: evaluate expression A for highlighting if expression B is not present
• +A: if expression A is present in document, highlight this expression A and evaluate other parts of the query separately. Otherwise, highlight nothing from the query.

The full list of operators that can now be used in hit highlights are as follows: “AND”,”&&”,”+”,”NOT”,”-”,”OR”,”||”. Parentheses “()” can be used to nest logical blocks in hit highlights. An in-depth explanation on usage of these operators can be found in the article Searching through the content of documents.

Standardize and display metadata timezone for document exports to ZIP and CSV

You can now see project timezones appended for any document’s DateTime values, provided that timezone information was found for that document. Appended timezones are primarily visible in the results table and the review window.

If a document’s DateTime values have no timezone information, which can occur if a document was ingested with no timezones in its load file, (unknown timezone) is appended for those DateTime values. Please note that DateTime values with (unknown timezone) are not converted to the project timezone and remain unchanged even if the project timezone is updated to another timezone. 

Also, you can now export documents into a ZIP or CSV file, and the project timezone that was applied to the documents’ DateTime values will export exactly as seen on the platform. 

Learn more about project timezone in this Knowledge base article.

Improvements to processing of Microsoft Teams exports

We've made a number of improvements to the processing and handling of Microsoft teams exports as part of this release, including (1) better parsing of chat participants and (2) improved identification and extraction of exact attachment duplicates. In addition, we've made our processing system more resilient to errors on Microsoft's part, particularly broken JSON files. 

[Everlaw AI Beta] Coding suggestions

Coding suggestions allows you to evaluate documents in accordance with your coding sheet with AI assistance. For every configured code, EverlawAI Assistant will now give a suggestion of whether it should be applied or not with an explanation of the suggestion and links to relevant document snippets. You can use coding suggestions to speed up review determinations or configure the tool to quickly surface difficult-to-find, material insights from documents. 

Getting started with coding suggestions is easy:

1. Navigate to Project Settings > General > LLM Tools (AI)
2. Toggle on “Enable coding suggestions” and follow the wizard to annotate the categories and codes you want to generate suggestions for
3. Optionally add a case description to provide further background context about your matter to improve suggestions

To help you make the most out of this tool, we have created an Everlaw Guide on Writing Descriptions for Coding Suggestions. For a detailed walkthrough of the feature, check out our knowledge base article about the beta features here. 

In the near future, we will expand this functionality to include batch generation of coding suggestions and the ability to search by suggested codes. Stay tuned!

[Everlaw AI Beta] Batch summarization

Instead of clicking into each document to generate individual summaries, you can now batch generate summaries for up to 1,000 documents at a time in a single click. In addition to the summaries, Everlaw will also generate a short document description, which can be viewed in the Review Window, Results table, and Storybuilder Timeline. Document descriptions are also exportable directly from the Results Table.

We hope batch functionality makes it easier to understand what’s inside your corpus at scale and helps get you to what matters faster. For example, you can now quickly profile a set of documents received in a production.