Document Access Management

Document Access Management allows Project Administrators to control which documents a user group can view or modify on Everlaw. This is useful if you would like to manage access to specific document sets and do not want to create a full break in terms of coding, messaging, and administration by creating a new project. 

Restricting a user’s document access restricts their access to other functionality throughout the rest of the platform, as outlined in the Affected permissions section of this article.

When to use Document Access 

By default, each user group has access to all documents in a project. Document Access is a project permission setting that Project Admins use to configure which documents each user group can and cannot access. This is useful in several situations:

• You have an expert witness who should only access a specific subset of technical documents
• You have a reviewer group who should be restricted from accessing sensitive documents
• A protective order restricts some users from accessing certain documents

Requirements

You must be a Project Admin to configure Document Access.

Before you can configure Document Access, you must create the Groups to which the configurations apply. 

Plan your configuration

You configure document access by building a query to identify the documents to restrict. There are two ways to think about it. The way you think about it will affect how you build your query.

1. If there is a specific subset of documents that you want a selected group to access, and you want to restrict all other documents, build a query to identify those documents. 
   It can be helpful to add all those documents to a binder before you configure the access restrictions, so that the query is easy to build once you're in the settings page. This tip works if your set is static and you don't expect changes, since the contents of binders must be manually updated.
   In the example image below, the user group can only access the 4 documents in the "Technical documents" binder, while the remaining 5,252 documents are restricted. 
   
2. If there is a specific subset of documents that you do not want your selected user group to access, you can specify this using the NOT logical operator. For example, if all your sensitive documents are in a binder called "Sensitive Documents," you can build your query so that the user group can access all documents in the project except those in the "Sensitive Documents" binder. In the example image below, the query uses the NOT logical operator to specify that the Reviewers group can see all documents except the 26 documents in the "Sensitive Documents" binder, which are restricted. 
   

Configure document access

To configure document access:

1. Access the Document Access tab. To do so, go to Project Management > Project Settings > Permissions > Document Access.
2. To pick the user group whose document access you are modifying, select the group name or caret at the top. This opens a dropdown of the existing user groups for you to select from.
   
   
3. To restrict a user group’s access, change their Document access from Full to Partial.
   
   

   Note

   Restricting access to some documents may restrict that group’s permissions on other parts of the platform. For a list of all affected permissions, read the Affected permissions section at the end of this article.

4. In the Visible documents section, build a query to identify which documents the users in the selected group should access. To learn more about building a search using the query builder, check out the Search Overview documentation.
   
   As described in the Plan your configuration section, you can build your query to specify a subset of documents for the users to access, or use the NOT logical operator to identify a subset of documents that the users should not have access to.
   The display at the bottom updates to show you how many documents are visible and how many are restricted. This is helpful 
5. [Optional] If you want to grant users in the group access to restricted documents if they are part of an assignment, select Always allow access to restricted documents if they are assigned.
   For more information about access via assignment and how document restrictions affect assignments, read the Assignments section of the Assignment Groups article.
6. When you're done, select Save settings. This sets the document restrictions for the specified user group. The restrictions may take up to one minute to take effect.

Here are some more details about how document access works, once it is configured:

• Users with partial document access cannot see the query that defines which documents they can access and they do not get any information regarding which documents they cannot access.
• If a user is in multiple groups, they are able to access all of the documents available to each group. For example, if a user is in a group that only has access to emails, and another group that only has access to spreadsheets, then that user will have access to both emails AND spreadsheets.
• If your query includes any binders, they will be shared with all Project Admins on your project so they can continue to manage document access.

Determining user access

Once document access settings have been configured, you or other administrators may need to know which users have access to various documents. You can access these details in:

• The review window
• Via search
• Project settings 

Review Window

In the review window, Project Admins can see which users have access to a specific document. To do so, select the View document access details button in the review window. 

This opens the Document access popup, where you can see all the groups and users who can view this document.

All user groups on your project appear on this list. Select a group to see a list of users in the group and their document permissions. The information in the list will be as follows:

User’s permission	What will be shown in the Document access list
A user has access to the document
A user has permission to view the document because of an assignment group, but doesn’t otherwise have access
A user does not have access to this document

Hover over Can access to see which group memberships are granting a user access to this document.

Search page

To build a search that captures all the documents that are visible to a user, use the Has Access search term.

This search term returns all of the documents accessible by a particular user or group:

• Searching against a particular user return all documents accessible by that user, including via assignment
• Searching against a user group will only return the documents specified in the Document Access Management query

Document Access Management detailed view in Project Settings

The Document Access tab under Permissions in Project Settings shows you a detailed view of each group’s document access.

In the example shown below, 288 documents are visible to this user group, and 4,968 documents are restricted. Select the numbers above Visible and Restricted to open a results table with the respective document(s). This lets you access all of the documents that a group can or cannot access.

Note that these numbers reflect the total number of documents captured by the query and do not include documents that a user may have access to through an assignment. 

Document Access Management table view

You can also view an overview of every group’s document access by selecting the Table view button on the Document Access Management page. 

The table view shows an overview of all groups and their document permissions on your project. The Access configuration column shows the query that captures a group’s visible documents. Select any of these values to view or modify the query.

The last two columns show the counts of visible and restricted documents. Note that these numbers do not include documents a user may have access to through assignments. Select these entries to open a results table with the respective documents. 

Feature dependencies

Document level permissions may affect a user’s experience with other features on Everlaw. Because a user does not know what they do and do not have access to, it is important that admins understand the implications of document access settings before configuring them. The below features include behaviors that are dependent on document access permissions. 

Assignment groups

On the Document Access page, you have the option to grant users Access via assignment. Access via assignment gives users access to restricted documents if they are assigned to that user. Unless this option is selected, users will only be assigned documents that they have permission to view. Similarly, users self-assigning will simply pass over documents they cannot access.

When this option is turned on, users will be given permission to view any documents assigned to them. In this case, assigners will be shown a warning that they are granting permissions by assigning the documents. Additionally, users are able to self-assign and view restricted documents.

When you Always allow access to restricted documents if they are assigned, access is limited to any documents that are assigned or included in the visible documents criteria. 

Grant permissions on assignment

When some users do not have access to all of the documents in an assignment group, and Always allow access to restricted documents if they are assigned is not turned on, documents in an assignment group are assigned such that restricted docs are assigned only to the users that have access. If there are remaining documents that no users can access, a warning displays and the remaining documents will be unassigned.

To assign these documents, you either have to modify your user group’s access, attempt to reassign the documents to users that do have access, or turn on Always allow access to restricted documents if they are assigned.

If a user loses access to documents that are assigned to them, those documents become invisible to the user (including in all document counts) but remain assigned to them. The assignment group page shows a warning when there are assigned documents that some users are unable to view, and a Unassign restricted documents allows you to to batch unassign the restricted documents.

Batch actions

Batch actions only modify documents that a user can access. For example, a user  who has access to some, but not all PDFs on a project does a search for all PDFs. IN their results they only see a subset of the total PDFs on the project. If the user then does a batch modification (such as adding a code to all the documents), only the documents visible to the user will be affected. 

To learn more about batch actions and how they may be affected by document permissions, visit this help article on Batch Actions.

Auto-code

Auto-code rules only affect documents that a user has permission to access. When a user is restricte from one or more documents within the context of a code with an auto-code rule, it will create auto-code violations on your project. You can learn more about auto-code violations in our Use Coding Rules to Structure Review article.

Context panel

The context panel only displays information a user has access to (e.g. only the emails in the email chain they have access to). Users with document access restrictions are notified in the Context Panel that restricted documents are hidden. Additionally, the file path explorer context is turned off for users with partial document access s, as this could potentially give a user information about documents that they cannot access. Please note that if a user selects “Highlight inclusive emails” when they do not have access to the most inclusive email, no emails in the context panel will be highlighted. As a result, the user will know that they do not have access to every email in the thread.

Data visualizer

Data Visualizer is still accessible to users with partial document access, but visualizations automatically filter out any documents a user does not have access to. As a result, users in groups with differing document permissions may see different document counts for the same visualizations.

Affected permissions

Restricting a user group’s document access change that group’s access to other parts of Everlaw. For example, a user that does not have full document access will not be able to use Predictive Coding. A comprehensive list of all features that are affected when a group has partial document access can be found below.  

Feature	Effect
Search Term Reports Analytics Predictive Coding Productions Uploads	No access
Searches	Users will only see documents in the results table that they have access to.
Context Panel	The Context Panel may be incomplete if users have partial document access. The Context Panel has a warning that not all documents are available.  The document’s file path will not be explorable.
Shared Searches and Binders	If any user receiving an object has document restrictions, the sharer will be given a warning that the recipients may not be able to see all of the documents. When the recipient(s) open the search/binder they will see the subset of documents that they have access to.
Assignment Groups	Users without full document access are not allowed to manage assignments or access assignment groups. Project admins cannot assign documents to users without access to those documents, unless they have enabled the Access via assignment setting.
Storybuilder (Story, Drafts, Depositions)	Users cannot access Storybuilder objects (Story, Drafts, Depositions) that contain any documents they cannot access.
Metadata auto-complete	Metadata search term auto-complete is turned off for users with document restrictions. This means that there is no dropdown that displays values matching what the user has entered into the term.
File Path search term	The “File Path” search term is turned off for users with document restrictions.