Search Term Reports

A search term report (STR) allows you to run multiple content and/or metadata searches simultaneously. The STR provides information about the number of documents that hit on any of the searches within a search term report.

Using search term reports, you can explore documents in the early phases of your project, before performing a more detailed review. Search term reports are also helpful for triaging your review and creating assignments.

This article explains how to create and manage STRs on Everlaw.

Permissions for search term reports

Below are the necessary permissions for accessing Search Term Reports:

• Receive: You can receive search term reports shared by others. On an STR that is shared with you, the sharer can give you:
  • View permissions: you cannot view but not edit the report.
  • Edit permissions: you can change the searchable set and update searches in the report.  
  • share and delete permissions: you can change the searchable set and update searches in the report, as well as share and delete the report itself. You can access shared search term reports from the appropriate card(s) on the homepage, or from the attached card(s) in the message center.
• Create: You can receive and create search term reports
• Admin: You have full permissions on all search term reports in the project 

You can read more about configuring feature permissions here. Please note, users subject to document access management will not be able to access search term reports.

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Search term report term definitions

• Searchable set: The searchable set defines the set of documents that you are running your searches across. If left undefined, the searchable set is simply the entire set of documents in the project.
• Table of searches: The table of searches lists the individual searches that you’re running within a single search term report. The set of documents that you are running these searches across is defined by the searchable set.
• Documents with hits: This is the number of documents that are returned by a given search. These documents could also be returned by any one of the other searches in the search term report.
• Documents exclusive to search: This is the number of documents that are returned by a given search, and only that search.
• Documents with hits (including attachment family members): This is the number of documents that are returned by the given search, plus the number of attachment family members those documents have. Please note that if a document is a family member of multiple documents that contain a hit, that document will be counted here once.
• Daily auto-refresh: Turning on daily auto-refresh will re-run the search term report each day at approximately midnight PST. This will allow you to keep your results up to date when using the Search Term Report search term. Please note that the daily auto-refresh setting is toggled off by default for new search term reports.

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Create a new Search Term Report

To create a Search Term Report:

1. Select Document Analytics > Search Term Reports.
   
   
2. Select + New report
3. Click Name your search term report and type in the name of your STR. To favorite an STR so that the associated card shows up under the favorites column on the homepage, select the star to the left of the name.
   
   
4. [Optional] To edit the searchable set, select Edit in the searchable set box. Although the dropdown search terms are a bit more limited than the search page, the general mechanics of building a search are the same.
   Once you are happy with your searchable set criteria, Save. 
   • To learn more about how to build out a criteria using the interface, visit our search help articles.
   • By default, document deduplication is turned off, so leaving the searchable set unspecified allows Everlaw to look across all the documents in your project, including duplicates. To limit your searchable set to all the unique documents, edit the searchable set, and check the Hide all project duplicates box underneath the query builder. Similarly, you can limit your searchable set to the deduplicated set of documents matching your searchable set criteria by selecting Search settings and choosing Deduplicate within search hits.
   • A document count of your searchable set is displayed, along with the total number of documents in your project. The bar in the middle displays the percentage of total documents in your project that are part of your searchable set.
     
5. Add a search via the table of searches. You have a couple options for adding new searches:
   • Type directly into the input box: The input box is restricted to a content search. You can use all the advanced content search types and functionality that you can on the main search page. If dtSearch® syntax is detected in your search, a dropdown will prompt you to click on the dropdown to translate your search into Everlaw-supported syntax.
     If you toggle to the Query Builder tab, you are given access to a query builder with metadata, content, and logical operator search terms that you can use to create your search.
   • Import multiple searches: Select Import multiple search terms to access an interface to copy and paste searches to add to your search term report.
     • The searches must be in the format of one search per line.
     • You can use advanced content search types, as well as parentheses and the AND/OR operators, to create more complex content searches. You can also translate your terms from dtSearch® syntax into Everlaw-supported syntax. 
     • You can import a text file that has one search per line.
     • You can import either content, all text fields, or metadata in one single import. Selecting all text fields will search across all text metadata, and the Include document contents checkbox allows you to search across both text metadata and contents at once. When choosing metadata, you can choose to only include exact metadata hits by choosing the exact checkbox. 
       
       
     • Depending on how many searches you add at a time, and the complexity of those searches, it can take anywhere from a couple seconds to a couple minutes for your search term report to update. You can perform other tasks on Everlaw while waiting for your report to update.
6. As you add terms, the results of your search term report update.

Understand your search term report results

After adding a search to a search term report, the table at the bottom of the interface and the graph at the top of the interface adjust to reflect information about your updated search term report.

The table

Here is a description of each column:

• Search lists all of the searches that are being run against your searchable set in a given search term report.
• Documents with hits displays the number of documents within the searchable set that are returned by a particular search. This hit count could also include documents that include the other hits in the table. For example, in the image above 63 documents contain the word "enron." Since "documents exclusive to search" is only 44 we know that there are documents that include the term "enron" and at least one other term in the table. Specifically we know that 19 documents (the difference between 63 and 44) contain at least one other term besides "enron."
• Documents exclusive to search displays the number of documents in the searchable set that are returned by a particular search, and only that search, within the search term report. In the screenshot above, the search "energy" returns 36 documents in our searchable set, but only 23 of those documents are returned by only that search, and by no other searches in the search term report. These 23 documents do not contain the words "oil," "enron," or "stock," nor the metadata search “To @hotmail.com". On the other hand, the search "To @hotmail.com" has 0 hits exclusive to that search.  
• In thinking about these two columns together, the difference between Documents with hits and Documents exclusive to search is the number of documents that contain at least one of the other search terms in your report. We can also learn  that all of the documents retrieved by "To @enron.com" are also responsive to one of the other searches in your report. There are 0 documents that exclusively have the term "To @enron.com" and don't have any other term in the table.
• Documents with hits (including attachment family members displays the count of all emails and their attachments that have been returned by the searches in your search term report. For example, if an email with three attachments hits on one of your search terms, the number displayed in this column will be four (the email, plus three attachments). If you normally review documents and their family members together, including the attachment family members will give you a better sense of the total number of documents needing review.

To sort your table: Select any of the headers: Search, Documents with hits, Documents exclusive to search, or Documents with hits (including attachment family members). You can sort by ascending or descending order.

To delete a search: click the appropriate trash can in the far right column. The row associated with the search will be grayed out, and the numbers on the table will adjust to reflect the deletion of the search. You can undo a deletion by clicking on the undo icon that will replace the trashcan icon in the far right column.

Select any of the numbers in the table tp open a results table with those documents. This is the easiest way to access results from your search term report.

Search term report graph

A visualization of the total number of results relative to the total number of documents in the searchable set is in the upper left of the search term report page.

• The blue number in the center of the circle labeled All results represents all results of the search term report
• The maroon segment of the circle labeled Documents with hits  refers to the documents returned by the searches in the search term report
• The orange segment labeled Family members refers to family members of the documents with hits.

Click any of these numbers to open the results in a search using the Search Term Report search term.

Refreshing

The box on the top left shows you when the search term report was last updated. Here is some additional information about refreshing search term reports.

• Your search term report automatically refreshes three seconds after a new term is added
• You can manually refresh the report by selecting Refresh now
• The daily auto-refresh toggle allows you to automatically refresh the search term report each day at approximately midnight PST
• Note: The displayed refresh time will reflect the time zone in which your browser is located

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Copy, Export, Persistent hits, Share, Delete

Copy: Creates a new search term report that is a carbon copy of the original. This is a good option if you want to make adjustments to a search term report, but retain the original report and result.  

Export: There are two options for downloading information contained in a search term report. To access the download options, click on the download button in the upper right of the interface.

• The CSV option downloads a CSV file reflecting the information in the table
• The PDF option downloads the entire search term report

Persistent hits: If you have project administrator permissions, you will see the Persistent Hits button. This button allows you to export your terms to persistent highlights in Project Settings. Upon creation, your report title will become the category for your persistent highlights. All searches that include only content terms will be included as highlights. Any non-content searches are excluded. This includes searches with metadata terms or with the use of logical operator NOT. If you export a term that is a duplicate, the term will be skipped.  If there are no new highlights that will be transferred, you will receive a notification indicating so. 

Share: By default, a search term report is private to the creator. To share a search term report, click the share button. Just as with binders, you can give the recipients of your message varying permission levels:

• View: Recipients can only see the search term report
• Edit: Recipients can also make changes to the search term report (ex. modify the searchable set, add/remove searches)
• Share and Delete: Recipients can share and delete the search term report itself, as well as remove user permissions on the search term report for any user except themselves and the owner.

Delete: Select the trash can to delete a search term report. Deleted search term reports cannot be recovered.

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A deeper look into interpreting the search term report

Here are a couple examples to further illustrate how to interpret your search term table: 

• Documents exclusive to search: The search "'price fixing'~15" returns 381 documents with hits in our searchable set. This means that 381 documents in the searchable set had the words "price" and "fixing" within 15 words of each other. However, there were zero "Documents exclusive to search" returned by that search. This means that, of the 381 documents that fit the "'price fixing'~15" search criteria, all of them fit the criteria of at least one of the other searches (i.e. "energy", "price*", "california AND (energy OR commission)"). In other words, none of the documents returned by the "'price fixing'~15" search were only returned by that search. Put another way, the "'price fixing'~15" search returned no unique documents relative to the other searches in the search term report.
• The difference between the Documents with hits and Documents exclusive to search: the number of documents that include at least one of the other search terms in your report. For example, the difference between the number of "documents with hits" and "documents exclusive to search" for the "energy" search is 8,206 documents (i.e. 14,049 hits - 5,843 exclusive documents = 8,206). This means that 8,206 of the documents that satisfy the "energy" search criteria also satisfy at least one of the other search criteria in the search term report.  

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Tips for creating search term reports on large projects

If you create STRs on projects with large document sets, here are a couple of tips to help you find the documents you are looking for:

• Narrow down your wildcard searches so that they are not so broad that they end up returning documents that you don’t need. For example, if you are using the wildcard search "net*" to look for all instances of network or networks. This search will return any word that begins with net and is therefore too broad. In this case, you should create a wildcard search for network* to narrow down your search.
• Look out for common words in your searches. If you are using a wildcard search that will return common words (like “in*” or “no*") narrow down your search by specifying which variations of the word you are looking for instead of using the wildcard search. For example, avoid using the search “check in*” because in* could be searching for thousands of word variations. Instead, simply list all the variants you are looking for, separated by an OR: “check in” OR “check ins” OR “check inning” OR “check innings”
• The two most common reasons that search terms fail are because of syntax errors or overly broad searches. A useful troubleshooting step is to copy and paste the erroring term into a separate, regular contents search on the Project Search page. Run the term as its own search will to identify the specific part of the term that is causing the error, be it a syntax issue or an overly broad piece.
• If you recently initiated an upload, wait until the upload is complete to run search term reports. Additionally, if your team is planning to upload more data that may be in the searchable set of a search term report, its results may change and terms that previously worked may now error.
• The searchable set defines the set of documents that you are running your searches across. If the searchable set is left undefined, your search term report will search across all documents in your project. Utilize searchable sets on the search term report preview page to narrow down the number of documents you are searching across. For example, update your searchable set from all documents to a particular custodian or date range.