Table of Contents
- Formatting your upload
- Accessing the uploader
- Bates numbering documents
- Additional options
- Summary
- Upload
Everlaw’s processed uploader allows for a seamless and convenient upload for produced PDFs without a load file. Simply drag and drop files or folders of PDFs, and Everlaw will upload the documents as processed data.
If instead you would like to learn how to upload document sets with a load file, check out this article.
Formatting your upload 
The uploader accepts documents that are named with or without a Bates number. Everlaw gives you an option to upload documents by their detected Bates numbers, such as uploading PDF ABC001.pdf as document ABC001 on the platform. PDFs that do not have a detected Bates number or PDFs with a Bates number but no Bates prefix, will be uploaded with a default prefix EVER. Please ensure there is no suffixing in the names of your documents, as that could lead to errors during processing.
Overlapping Bates Please note that by default Everlaw does not upload documents that overlap any other Bates range in your upload or in your database, unless the “Overlapping Bates” setting (located on the Database Settings page within the “General” tab) is enabled. For example, let’s say that you drop in a folder with document ABC001.pdf, which has two pages, and another document ABC002.pdf. The processed uploader reads ABC001.pdf and reserves Bates numbers ABC001 and ABC002 for that document. This means ABC002.pdf cannot be uploaded because it has an overlapping detected Bates number of ABC002. To upload ABC002.pdf, you will need to either rename the file so it no longer has an overlapping Bates range or enable the “Overlapping Bates” setting for the database. Learn more about the “Overlapping Bates” setting.
However, documents with the same detected BeginBates number in their filename are considered overlapping regardless of any suffixes and cannot be uploaded to the platform. For example, ABC001.pdf and ABC001_Translation.pdf are considered to have the same BeginBates number (ABC001) and thus cannot both be uploaded to the platform even if the Overlapping Bates setting is enabled.
Bates Ranges PDFs named after their full Bates range, such as a 3 page document named ABC001-AB003.pdf can be uploaded, assuming that this range does not overlap with any other Bates numbers. This document would be uploaded with the Bates number ABC001, as documents on Everlaw are only referred to by their Begin Bates.
# Prefix Documents with a # prefix, such as filename #123.pdf, are treated like any other PDF files that do not have a detected Bates number: they will be uploaded with a default prefix EVER. If you would like to upload these documents and assign a new prefix, you need to upload the documents with a load file.
Accessing the uploader
In order to access the processed data uploader you must have database upload permissions and/or organization administrator permissions. The uploader is also available to all Storybuilder by Everlaw users.
Please note that the processed uploader is available only on the Chrome, Edge, and Firefox web browsers.
To begin a processed upload from within a project, navigate to the data transfer icon in the navigation bar and select Uploads. From the “+ New upload” section, you can select “Processed” and then “PDFs without a load file”. Organization administrators can upload data from the Processed Uploads tab in the Organization Administrator page.
When you click “Start upload” you will be brought to a screen where you can drag and drop multiple files or select a folder from your machine.
After choosing files to upload, you will then be prompted to enter an upload name. If you’ve uploaded a folder, the field will be pre-populated with its name. Note that upload names must be unique. If you enter a duplicate upload name, you will be prompted to enter a different name.
Bates numbering documents
The next step is where you can confirm how the documents will be named once uploaded. On the Bates numbering page, Everlaw will display all the detected Bates prefixes in a table, where you can choose to include or exclude them in your upload. Any new Bates prefixes (prefixes that do not exist on your database) within your upload are identified with a preceding (!) icon and listed in bullet points below the table. All documents without valid Bates prefixes in this step, including those with # prefixes and those with a Bates number but no Bates prefix, will be uploaded with a default Everlaw prefix EVER.
By default Everlaw uploads the documents with the detected prefixes, but you can also choose to ignore any by unchecking their respective rows. In addition, you can add prefixes for Everlaw to look for within the filenames using the green “Edit prefixes” button on the top right corner of the prefix table.
Clicking this will open a dialog box where you can input additional prefixes per line. Any prefixes that have been added by user-input are prioritized over Everlaw-detected ones.
You can use the workflow of unchecking and adding prefixes to correct any mistakenly-detected prefixes. For example, say that you have a document JKL01.1.pdf with detected prefix JKL, such as in the gif below. If instead you wanted the prefix KL, you can uncheck JKL from the table and add KL via the "Edit prefixes" button, in which case the document would now be uploaded as KL01.1.
Prefixes that are eligible to be added are those that can be found within the filenames of your documents. For example, you cannot add the prefix “JAS” if the prefix JAS is not in any of the filenames of your upload. Additionally, prefixes are only valid if the remaining filename is a valid number. In the example above, choosing "J" or "JK" as a prefix will not work for document JKL01.1.pdf but "KL" or "L" will be a valid prefix.
You can also choose to upload the PDFs with empty prefix by clicking the “Allow Bates with empty prefix” checkbox. An “(empty prefix)” display value will be shown in the Bates prefix table. Note that a document name must start with a numerical digit in order for it to be assigned an empty prefix.
If you want to restore the original detected prefixes, you can click “Reset Prefixes” on the left side of the "Edit prefixes" button.
Whenever you check, uncheck, or add a prefix, the filenames will be reanalyzed and the table updated accordingly.
Please note that this Bates numbering stage will only include valid PDFs found in your upload folder. If documents are not uploaded for any reason (they are not PDFs, are encrypted, file size is too large, etc), Everlaw provides an error report in CSV that you can download to troubleshoot if needed.
After you have validated the prefixes in this upload, click Next. If your upload contains a new Bates prefix, you will need to confirm the addition of the new prefix before you proceed with your upload. Here, a dialog box will appear that identifies any new prefixes contained within the upload and the name of the current database.
Click the checkbox within the dialog box to confirm that this new prefix should be added to the current database. Once the checkbox is clicked, the “Add prefixes” button is no longer grayed out and you can click it to proceed with your upload. This process acts as a safeguard to ensure that you are uploading to the correct database.
Note: In general, the dialog box to confirm the new prefixes will not appear on the first upload to a new database. However, when uploading processed data with new prefixes through the Organization Admin page, the dialog box prompting approval for new prefixes appears for all uploads (including the first upload).
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. If you are initiating a processed upload from the Org Admin page, you will not see this step.
Summary
This step gives you a summary of your upload configuration, including prefixes settings and any applied custom field values or work product. If there are no errors, you can proceed by clicking Upload.
By default, Everlaw does not upload documents that have overlapping Begin Bates numbers, and you will be alerted if any are detected at this step. You can download an error report of documents that were skipped and rename the documents to have unique Bates numbers before trying to upload again, or continue the upload anyway without them. By clicking “skip errors and continue,” documents with overlapping Bates ranges identified in this step will not be uploaded.
In the alternative, you can enable the Overlapping Bates setting for your database so that you can ignore overlapping Bates warnings and continue uploading documents with overlapping Bates ranges to the same database. By clicking “ignore warnings and continue,” documents with overlapping Bates ranges identified in this step will be uploaded.
Learn more about the “Overlapping Bates” setting and common processed data errors including overlapping Bates errors.
Upload
Once you click ‘Upload’, Everlaw will generate a load file for you and upload the images, as well as extract text and metadata.
If you are uploading PDFs that do not have embedded text:
- Everlaw will OCR these documents upon upload to generate a text file and extract any present metadata
- Everlaw will not generate a PDF with embedded text from these documents. This means that hit highlights and other text-based tools in the review window will not work on the image view of these documents. Database Admins, users with Database Upload permissions, and Organization Administrators can reprocess documents from the results table to embed this text in their images. To learn more about reprocessing Non-Everlaw processed documents, check out this article.
If your upload contains documents that already exist in your database, you can choose only to upload the new documents, only overlay the existing documents found, or do both. Note that partial project selection will only affect newly uploaded documents, not overlays. You can learn more about mixed processed uploads in this article.
Once you begin uploading, you can see the progress of the transfer and upload via a progress bar. You can return to your processed uploads by clicking “Back to Uploads” on the bottom right. Uploading will continue in the background as long as the browser tab stays open, and you can track the progress on the Processed Upload card.
You can navigate to “Complete” in the Processed Uploads tab to find the completed upload card. If you want to look at or download the load file(s) that was generated during your upload, you can view the Upload Configuration dialog from the three dot menu of the card. You can also download a report of errors that occurred during the upload by clicking "View Results" on the upload card and navigating to the "Skipping due to errors" tab.
Documents will have been uploaded with a Bates number with Filename and Filepath metadata. You can click on the number on the upload card to view the PDFs that have been uploaded in the results table.
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