Upload Native Data to Everlaw

Everlaw has a cloud-processing system that automatically processes and ingests native files into the platform. Documents processed on Everlaw go through de-NISTing, deduping, OCR, AV transcription, and language detection, as appropriate. Additionally, Everlaw generates text, metadata, and PDFs (if requested) for your native data.

A native upload can contain one file, or multiple files. For more information about preparing your files for upload, please see this article. 

You can use this article to:

• Guide you step-by-step through a native upload 
• Learn about managing native uploads once they are on Everlaw

To read more about uploading documents on Everlaw, please refer to the articles in our Uploads section.  

Table of Contents

• Create a native data upload
  • Required permissions 
  • Step 1: Access the Uploads page
    • Upload via cloud-based apps
    • Upload via direct link 
  • Step 2: Dataset details
  • Step 3: Select custodians
  • Step 4: Upload into partial projects
  • Step 5: Additional options
  • Step 6: Summary
  • Step 7: Transfer and Processing
  • Troubleshooting errors 
• View and manage native uploads
  • Upload card
  • View upload configuration settings
  • Delete an upload
  • Add documents to an upload
• View upload details
  • Upload details: Transferring tab
    • Cloud upload configuration
  • Upload details: Processing tab
  • Upload details: Upload report tab
• Cross-upload reports
• Native data processing settings

Create a native data upload

Required permissions 

To upload data on Everlaw, you must be a Database Administrator, have Upload permissions on the database, or be an Organization Administrator.

Step 1: Access the Uploads page

To access the Uploads page:

1. From the homepage, go to Data Transfer > Uploads.
2. Select Native. 
3. Select Start upload.
4.  Drag and drop your upload into the box, or select Browse to select files from anywhere on your computer.
   • Please see this article for information on how to prepare your files.

Upload via cloud-based apps

At the bottom of the screen, you will see options to upload directly from the following apps: 

• Asana
• Microsoft 365 (also known as Office 365, O365, or M365)
• Jira
• Slack
• Zoom
• Zendesk

You can also upload via popular cloud based storage apps: 

• Box
• Dropbox
• Google Drive 
• SharePoint
• OneDrive
• ShareFile
• Google Vault
  • You can also upload exported Google Vault files

Select an app to begin uploading your documents.  

Once you select an app, you will be asked to log in via a separate dialog box. If you do not see this dialog box, check your pop-up settings. After logging in, you will be able to select your files directly from the app's platform. Once you hit enter or submit within that app, you will be taken to the next step in the upload process.

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Upload via direct link 

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Once you’ve made your selection, a wizard will appear where you can specify settings for the upload:

Step 2: Dataset details

In this step, you specify the configuration for your upload. By default, your upload settings will be inherited from the last upload in this database. 

1. Name: You are required to give the dataset a unique name. The name (and date of upload) will appear as the name of the associated uploads card on the homepage, which you can rename later if you have upload permissions. 
2. Deduplication: Upon upload, you have the following options:
   • Global: Deduplicate against all of the existing documents that have been natively uploaded in your database.
     • Everlaw does not deduplicate against Processed uploads.
   • By custodian: Deduplicate against all of the existing documents by custodian. 
     • This means that if two duplicates have different custodians, they will both be uploaded. Conversely, if a document has the same custodian as another duplicate document that already exists on the platform, the duplicate file will not be uploaded.
   • None: No deduplication.

   Even if you choose to deduplicate globally, Everlaw will preserve a record of the deduplicated document in the All Custodians and All Paths fields that are populated for the existing document on the database. This means that if a document with custodian Sam  is deduplicated against a document with custodian Jenny, the existing document on the database will now list both Sam and Jenny in its All Custodians metadata.

   To learn more about the definition of duplicates and how upload deduplication handles documents (and families), visit this article on duplicates.

   • Note: Google files (e.g., Google Documents, Google Sheets) will not get deduplicated in the same way as other file types, because they undergo their own conversion process within Google. 
3. Passwords:  If any of your files/folders are password-protected, input the password(s) into the password box (one password per line) to enable Everlaw to image and extract text based on your processing options. Inaccessible files will not be processed. The native view will not be available for password-protected documents on Everlaw.
4. Advanced Settings (language and location, image details, and decryption) can be viewed and edited by clicking the caret icons under Advanced Settings, which are collapsed by default.
   • OCR Language: This step allows you to specify particular languages for Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
     • OCR is automatically run on TIFFs, PDFs without embedded text, and PDF pages with fewer than 50 embedded non-whitespace characters.
     • Image files like JPGs and PNGs that do not typically to have text are not OCR'd upon upload, though OCR can be forced as part of reprocessing.
     • By default, OCR language detection is set to Autodetect.
       • Autodetect can extract all Latin-alphabet languages (such as French and German) as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK). If your document has a combination of these aforementioned languages, Autodetect will also be able to OCR them automatically as long as there is only one language per page. Autodetect will not reliably OCR multiple languages within one page.
         • Select Autodetect if your upload includes multiple documents, each in different languages.
           • However, this means that non-Latin, non-CJK language documents will not get properly OCRed. For example, if one document is entirely in Arabic (non-latin, non-CJK language), and another is in French (Latin language), then only the French document will be properly OCRed. In this situation, you can separate those documents into different uploads so that you can select the appropriate OCR language setting for each, or, after processing, select specific subsets of documents from the results page for reprocessing with a different OCR language.
       • You can also select a single language to target for OCR. In this mode, OCR will only detect that language and English. There are two scenarios where you would want to select something other than Autodetect:
         • If all your documents are not in a Latin-alphabet language or CJK (e.g. Russian, Greek)
           • In this case, you must select that language from the dropdown menu in order for OCR to work for that document.
         • If the quality of your scanned document(s) is low, and you know there is only one language in the document (in addition to English)
           • • This improves the quality of OCR, but only for that language and English. It will prevent the detection of any other languages in that document, so you should be sure that the document only has only one non-English language before selecting that option.
       • You can also use the OCR language field to specify transcription of Spanish files with extractable audio. Select Spanish from the OCR language dropdown. You cannot transcribe Spanish files and OCR other documents with non-English languages in one upload. You can always reprocess Spanish media files and transcribe them in Spanish once they’re uploaded.
   • Default Timezone:
     • The selected timezone is assumed for any datetime metadata lacking an explicit timezone. Metadata without an explicit timezone will be given the selected timezone on Everlaw.
     • Email headers printed at the top of PDF images generated during processing show datetimes in the selected timezone.
   • Image Details
     
     

     • Create PDFs:  By default, Everlaw creates PDF images for all files in an upload, and placeholder images for file types that don’t image well (like spreadsheets). You can choose:

       • To image the file types that don’t image well
       • Not to image any of the files in an upload.

• • • In addition to Excel files, the following file types are not be imaged by default, and instead are given a placeholder image:
      • LibreOffice Calc
      • Empty files
      • Container files
      • iWorkNumbers
      • QuattroPro
      • .txt files that are greater than 1 MB
  • Page Size: Everlaw generates PDFs in the selected size for documents that do not have a described size. Documents with an explicit size (e.g. PDFs, word documents, and images) will remain in their original sizes. Emails do not typically have a described size, but if they do, they will remain in their original sizes on the platform. Documents exported, printed or produced from Everlaw will respect the size of the pages on the platform.
  • Email image attachments: There are three options for deciding whether image attachments should be displayed inline, or treated as separate attachments:
    • If you would like every image in the email to be displayed inline within the PDF, you can choose Inline all images found in emails.
    • If you would like email image attachments to be extracted as children of the parent email, select Extract all images found in emails.
      • Note: images that are explicitly inlined (eg. pasted into the email body) will not be extracted. 
    • If you choose smart determination, then Everlaw will dynamically determine which images are likely to be attachments, and which ones are (or are intended to be) inlined images (e.g., signature icons). Factors influencing this smart determination include an image's dimensions, overall size, and content ID. 
  • Hyperlinked images: When the option to fetch hyperlinked images is selected, Everlaw will attempt to fetch linked images that appeared to the original recipient in the body of the native document and display them in both the PDF and native files. The image presented will be the image located at the URL at the time of processing.
  • PowerPoint speaker notes: By default, speaker notes of .pptx, .ppt, and .pps files will be included in the PDF file with their original formatting—the "Notes Page" view in the PowerPoint application. Notes with overflow text will continue onto the following page. To optimize for slide legibility, users can choose to “Include speaker notes with optimized formatting,” which scales the slides, makes the page orientation landscape, and displays the speaker notes text under the slide. Each PDF page will contain the corresponding slide number, and overflow note text will continue on the following page. With this option, any customization of the “Notes Page” view in PowerPoint, such as the addition of headers and footers, will not be reflected in the PDF or text files. When the option to exclude speaker notes is selected, the slide will be full page in the PDF file with no notes present in the PDF or text file. Speaker notes will still be included in the native file and searchable via the Speaker Notes metadata search term.
• Decryption Keys: Everlaw can store private keys used to decrypt S/MIME encrypted emails. To learn more, read this article. You can follow this link to manage your decryption keys on a new tab.

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Step 3: Select custodians

The custodians step allows you to specify what custodian value to associate with the documents you’re uploading. You can specify a default custodian for all documents in an upload and/or set custom custodian values for particular files or folders. If your data belongs to multiple custodians, please read this article to learn how to prepare your data accordingly before uploading.

To set the custodian(s):

1. [Optional] Input the custodian name into the default custodian box at the top of the table. If your project already has custodians from legal holds or previous uploads, you can also select one from the dropdown list.
2. To set custom custodian values for particular files or folders, find the file/folder on the table. You can either input the custodian name into the custodian box or use the pencil icon next to each file/folder on the table to autofill the custodians using file/folder name
   • Alternatively, you can click the "Autofill all visible custodians" to autofill all custodian values in the table based on visible file/folder names. The custodian value for non-visible files (i.e. files that are hidden because the parent folders are collapsed) is assigned based on the closest visible parent.  
     • Files that have a black caret in the far left can be expanded to display the individual sub-folders/files they contain. Click on the caret icon to expand or collapse.
   • If there is a default custodian, it will be overridden for that particular file/folder with the custom value.
   • You can use the pencil icon next to each file/folder on the table to autofill the custodians using file/folder name. 

In the example above, the number (3) next to the autofill button indicates the number of visible files in the table and the corresponding number of custodian values that will be transferred based on file name. Clicking the autofill button will transfer these values to the custodians field for the respective files, in this case “Sample Upload.zip”, “Alice”, and “Bob.” Files collapsed under the “Alice” and “Bob” folders will inherit “Alice” or “Bob” as their custodian values. 

You can use the Clear all button to delete custodian values for all files, regardless of whether they are visible in the table. If there is a default custodian added, all custodian values will be changed to the default value. 

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Step 4: Upload into partial projects

Aside from uploading the documents into the current project you’re on, you can also add the documents to any partial project you have the Partial Project Document Management permission on.

• Documents are always added to all complete projects within the database
• Documents are always added to the project from which you have accessed the uploader
• There are no billing implications for adding data to multiple projects within the database

To select or deselect a project to add these documents to, click on the checkbox. You cannot deselect complete projects.

When you deduplicate your upload and then choose to upload documents to a partial project, it's possible that a document in your upload is a duplicate of an existing document in your database, but that existing document is not yet part of the partial project. When this happens, the existing document is added to the partial project.

To help you better identify such documents, Everlaw creates a new binder called "Deduplicated docs from dataset [Name]" in the affected partial project. This binder contains documents that (1) were not part of the partial project prior to the upload and (2) are now part of the partial project because they are existing versions of deduplicated documents from the upload. 

Step 5: Additional options

This step allows you to apply work product (ratings, codes, binders, notes, etc.) and custom metadata values to documents in your upload. For more information, please see this article on applying custom fields and work product during upload. 

Step 6: Summary

The summary step provides an overview of your upload, including configuration settings, projects being uploaded into, applied work product, and applied custom values. 

When you have confirmed that the details look good, select Upload.

Step 7: Transfer and Processing

Once you click Upload, your data begins transferring to Everlaw. The upload details overlay appears on the Transferring tab and shows you the status of the transfer. From the overlay, you can add additional documents to the upload by clicking on the + Add files button.

Important: You can close the overlay, but must stay on the Native Data Uploads page. Your file transfer will be interrupted If you leave this page. Once the transferring step is complete, you can leave the page.

A status card is added to the Native Data Uploads page corresponding to your upload. Once processing starts, a time estimate appears on the status card to indicate approximately how long it will be until processing is complete. 

As processing continues, you can start reviewing completed documents. Once all your files are successfully processed, the status card has a document icon with a green checkmark . Select the icon to go to a results table of your processed documents.  

Native uploads are each assigned a control number, indicated by a # prefix.

To learn how to view upload status, delete, rename, and take other actions, please see the Managing native uploads section.

Upload details: Transferring tab

While a transfer is in progress, you can visit this tab to monitor the progress of the transfer. 

Once a transfer is complete or in an error state, you can visit this tab to:

• See the success or failure status of the transfer
• See the source file(s) associated with the upload. You can also add new source files from this tab (see the Adding new documents to an upload section above for more information)
• Download any of the source files
• See the list of custodians assigned to the upload by clicking on "Show custodian assignment"

To troubleshoot transfer errors from an Office 365 upload, please visit this article.

Native data processing settings

Here are a few additional details about native processing on Everlaw:

• The orientation of documents is preserved from its native version (e.g., a document that is in landscape orientation will remain that way upon upload)
• Embedded files: Everlaw will extract all embedded files, including audio and video files, in a Microsoft 365 file (e.g., an Excel file embedded in a PowerPoint) and any file embedded in a PDF.
  
• Emails containing URL links to other supported documents will be recognized. See the context panel article to learn more.
• The children of container files are extracted with no limitation on depth. For example, a Word document attached to an email that’s attached to another email that’s in a Zip file that’s in another Zip file will be extracted.
  
• Hidden columns in Excel are displayed.
  
• Notes are extracted and presented in the PDF/Image view for Word documents and the Native view for spreadsheets.
  
• Sometimes, you may try to upload an entire hard drive or a folder with personal files mixed in with system/software files. Some of these files have no user-specific content and can be removed upon processing. This process is called deNIST (removing NIST files). Any files that are on the NIST list will qualify for deNISTing automatically upon upload. Binary files, and virtually all containers, are not part of this list and will not be removed.

In addition, chat data is processed according to the following rules:

Chat formats subject to 100 messages/doc limit	Cellebrite RSMF Bloomberg Hangout (JSON) Teams (Purview HTML) iChat/Messages database WhatsApp database
Chat formats that process to one document per conversation	Teams (PST) Teams (Cloud Connector) Hangouts (MBOX) Zoom
Chat formats that process to one document per day	Slack

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