On Everlaw’s search interface, you can use the Project search term to search for documents that also exist in other partial projects within the same database. This is especially useful for administrators of multiple projects, who may want to verify that each project holds the intended subset of documents compared to others. You can find this search term under the “Documents” search term list in both partial and complete projects.
Accessing projects within the Project Search term
The Project search term only takes into account partial projects, not complete projects. This is because searching against complete projects will always return all the documents in your project.
To be able to search a specific partial project, you must either be explicitly added to it, or given implicit access by your permission level. If you are an organization administrator on a database where OA access is set to 'Yes', or a database admin added to at least one of that database’s projects, you can search all partial projects within that database.
Anyone who has access to at least one other partial project in the database will be able to use the Project search term. If you cannot find the Project search term in your project, it may be because:
- You have not been added to any other partial projects in the database
- There are no other partial projects in the database
- You have access to only complete projects.
You cannot share a search that references a project that the recipient cannot access. These users will be grayed out in the search dialog, with a lock icon explaining why the share is restricted.
Searching against other partial projects
Let’s walk through a very simple example to illustrate how you could use this search term as part of your QA workflow. Let’s say that you are an administrator that needs to set up two project environments for different review teams, but first wants to verify that they contain the exact same documents. In this example, you are comparing the contents of two partial projects, “Energy Experts,” and “Legal Expert Review,” both of which are in the database “FOIA Files.”
To do so, first locate the Project search term on the search page of one of the two projects, such as “Energy Experts.” When you use the search term, you’ll find an automatically populated list of searchable projects within the database “FOIA Files.”
At this point, you want to compare all the documents of the project you’re currently in - Energy Experts - against that of the other partial project, “Legal Expert Review.” Assuming that you have access to that project, locate that project in the dropdown menu.
This search displays, within the project “Energy Experts,” all the documents also in “Legal Expert Review.” To find all the documents that are NOT in “Legal Expert Review,” negate the search term. If both projects hold the same subset of documents, you would expect 0 documents as the result. In the example screenshot below, there are still 387 more documents that must be added to “FOIA Files - Legal Expert Review” in order for the two projects to contain the exact same documents.
If you have Partial Project Document Management permissions on the destination project, you can then add those documents in “Energy Experts” to the partial project “Legal Expert Review.” To learn more about Partial Project Document Management, you can read more here.
The same logic of this simple example can be applied to accommodate more sophisticated QA workflows. To learn more about the additional search terms you can leverage in those complex searches, you can refer to this article.