January 24, 2020 Release: Depositions, New Navigation Bar, Search Across Projects, and more!
Expected US release: 24 January 2020
Expected AU, CA, EU, and UK release: 31 January 2020
In this release, we’re unveiling an entirely new tool for Everlaw: Depositions! The Depositions tool allows you and your colleagues to instantly reference documents in a deposition, mark them as exhibits, timestamp your conversations via a chat tool, and create and assign tasks in real time. Depositions are equipped with a searchable transcript viewer, automatic document and exhibit linking, and collaborative writing tools.
More than that, we’ve reimagined the entire Storybuilder suite and have outlined branding updates below.
We’ve also improved the entire navigation bar, updated searching for emails, added new views to the Data Visualizer, and added search functionality across projects for organization administrators.
Read on to find out more about all of these exciting new features!
Features
- Rebranding Storybuilder
- Story Dashboard
- Depositions
- New Navigation Bar
- Conversational Search Enhancements
- View Document Sets and Document Set Type in Data Visualizer
- [Org admin] Search Across Projects
Rebranding Storybuilder
This release features a major revamp of Storybuilder: a complete depositions tool, a text transcript viewer, an exhibit marking workflow, a high-level dashboard for your Storybuilder work, and much more. As a result of this new functionality, we’re also taking the opportunity to rebrand Storybuilder and its component tools.
Story: The primary object in Storybuilder that hosts any associated Draft and Deposition objects. All projects will have a Project Story by default, and all chronologies currently named Master Chronology will be renamed to Project Story. All documents and associated information (like labels, description, relevance, etc) that live in a Story can be used across associated Draft and Deposition objects.
Dashboard: The “homepage” of your Story, where you can view high level information about documents in your Story, manage outstanding tasks in Depositions, add potentially relevant documents, and access other objects in your Story easily.
Timeline: The primary document view within your Story, where you can organize relevant documents, labels, and events and view them in a timeline. All Stories contain one, and only one, Timeline. This functionality was previously known as “Chronology,” and this functionality has not been updated in this release. To learn more, check out the Timeline support article.
Deposition: An object designed to help you prepare for, conduct, and summarize a deposition. This is a new object that you can read more about in the sections below. For more information about Depositions, read these support articles.
Draft: An object where you can create written work product and reference documents in Everlaw. Drafts can be used to outline case strategy, to create a template for Depositions, or to create any document you would like your team to work on together, such as strategies, protocols, and briefs. This functionality was previously known as “Outlines,” and no substantial updates have been made in this release. Check out this support article for more information about Drafts.
Story Dashboard
The Story dashboard gives you a quick overview of the documents, Drafts, and Depositions in your Story. A quick glance at the Story dashboard should help you get a high-level overview of your team’s progress in a particular case.
The Documents in Story and Suggested additions box help you manage which documents are in your Story.
Your upcoming depositions and your tasks with upcoming due dates will be listed in the Upcoming events and Tasks boxes. You can learn how to add dates to your Depositions in the Depositions section of this guide below.
In Story documents with dates, you can visualize, filter by, and view documents by date. you’ll see a bar graph of all documents organized by date.
Depositions
We’re excited to introduce a tool that supports preparing for, conducting, summarizing, and reviewing your depositions. It includes the ability to prepare written work product and reference documents before the deposition, or to import existing work product from a Draft. During the deposition, you can mark referenced documents as exhibits, timestamp your notes and conversations via a chat tool, and create and assign tasks. Finally, you can create a summary directly in the Deposition object, upload a transcript with automatically linked exhibits, create new links based on apparent exhibit references detected in a transcript, and highlight/annotate text. You can even use a Deposition object to upload transcripts from past depositions directly.
Of course, the core component of preparing for a deposition is the ability to prepare written work product that can be generated collaboratively and shared across teams.
Once documents are available in the Deposition’s document panel, they can be added as referenced in your Deposition, bookmarked, marked as exhibits, and exported.
To learn more about setting up your deposition, check out this support article.
Depositions include a variety of useful tools to be used during the actual deposition.
- Timer: You can start, stop, pause, and reset a shared timer during the deposition. Chat messages and text in your Deposition can be time-stamped based on deposition duration.
- Chat: You can chat any colleague who has access to the Deposition in real-time without leaving the Deposition page, and export the chat transcript (with timestamps).
- Tasks: You can create and assign “to-dos,” optionally include a due date, and filter by only tasks created by or assigned to you, all while the deposition is ongoing.
To learn more about features you can use during a deposition, read this article.
With the conclusion of the deposition, the case lead or designated person can write a Summary to list key takeaways from the deposition in a notes editor. This is particularly useful as a way to easily digest the events from multiple depositions.
You can also upload the final transcript of the deposition as it becomes available in the transcript tab of the Deposition. Our transcript uploader accepts .txt, .pdf, and .ptx files and loads them as a scrollable text file with line numbering. Once the transcript file is rendered, multiple users can highlight specific lines of text, add annotations as needed, and run complex searches on transcript text. They can also click on any exhibit number or Bates number to preview and open the document for review.
To learn more about post-deposition tools, read this support article.
Exhibits can be auto-linked or manually linked for easy reference and review.
New Navigation Bar
The global navigation bar has been reorganized to be more intuitive. Rather than a single drop-down with all the features, users will be able to select from several categories of pages.
Conversational Search Enhancements
Following the type changes for email metadata in December, we are greatly improving our conversational search capabilities. Previously, email metadata such as To, From, CC, and BCC were treated as text strings, meaning those fields required users to perform laboriously exact searches to find their results. Now email metadata will be parsed into emails, contact names, and domains, each of which can be treated individually within a search, as opposed to as a single string. You will also see autocomplete options for each type of address.
Two new Smart Terms, Parties and Recipients, will also be added to Search. These two fields are automatically generated by Everlaw and will search against groups of email metadata fields, replacing the need to create aliases. Parties will search against the From, To, Cc, and Bcc fields and the Recipients term will search against the To, Cc, and Bcc fields.
To learn more about Smart Terms, read this support article.
View Document Sets and Document Set Type in Data Visualizer
Users will now be able to visualize and filter documents based on their Document Set and Document Set Type. The Document Set is the production or upload that brought that document into Everlaw. The Document Set Type describes how the document got into Everlaw (Native Upload, Processed Upload, or Production). The Document Set and Document Set Type filter can be found in Data Visualizer under the Document tab.
For more information about Data Visualizer, check out this article.
[Organization Administrators only] Search Across Projects
Organization Administrators can now simultaneously search across all projects. This is particularly useful for organizations that have many databases with similar or overlapping document sets.
Clicking “Search” will open up a results table that will instantly allow you to access any project with your search results already pulled up.
To learn more about Organization Administrators, read this help article.