Expected US release: 26 February 2021
Expected AU, CA, EU, and UK release: 5 March 2021
In Everlaw’s largest ever release, we’re launching exciting improvements to productions, uploads, messaging, and more! Our new Early Case Assessment tool will allow you to upload huge datasets to Everlaw at a much lower cost. We’ve also integrated pre-production quality assurance (QA) on Productions and added Microsoft Office 365 as one of the many platforms you can use to upload data to Everlaw directly from the cloud. We’ve also made improvements to messaging, data visualization, processed uploads, and accessibility. We’re releasing many other features this month as well, so read on to learn more!
Improvements:
- Early Case Assessment (ECA) Databases
- Integrated Pre-production Quality Assurance (QA)
- Direct uploading from Microsoft Office 365
- Message Center and Email Improvements:
- Data Visualizer on homepage
- Processed Upload Improvements:
- Accessibility Improvements:
- Share dialog improvements
- Bates type standard metadata fields
- Source file dialog improvements in native upload cards
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Early Case Assessment (ECA) Databases
Early in the litigation process, you may need to narrow down your document set before beginning review in a process called Early Case Assessment (ECA). Everlaw now has dedicated ECA databases with functionality geared toward this step in the process, where data will be billed at a much lower rate. ECA databases contain a complete ECA project with limited functionality and any number of partial review projects with full functionality. Narrow down your dataset in the ECA project, then promote documents to the review project when you’re ready to begin review.
If you are interested in using an ECA database, please reach out to your account manager on Everlaw’s Customer Success team or email support@everlaw.com. You can learn more about ECA databases at our ECA training.
To create an ECA database, click “Add a New Database” on the Organization Administrator page and select ECA as the database type.
The ECA database will automatically include one complete ECA project and one partial review project, although you can add more partial review projects to the database if you like.
The upload process in the ECA database is identical to the upload process in a review database. Both processed and native uploads are supported in ECA databases.
To help you prioritize your documents, ECA projects include the following features:
- Search and data visualizer
- Search term reports
- Review window
- PDF, native, and text viewers
- Binders
- Project settings for available features
- Project messaging
- The following pages under Analytics:
- Project sizes graph
- User activity page
- Promotion history
- Homepage folders
- Results table
- ECA-specific batch promotion codes
- Batch export of natives through the database settings page
In ECA projects, you won’t be able to select individual documents or subsets of documents from the results table. All actions, such as adding to binders or promoting documents, must be applied to all documents in the table. However, documents in a results table can be narrowed through grouping, additional searches, or use of data visualizer.
Once you’ve determined which documents should be reviewed, you can add them to a review project in the same database by promoting them. To promote documents, navigate to a results table in the ECA project, click the Batch icon on the toolbar, and then select Promote. You’ll also be prompted to add one or more promotion codes, which will help you keep a record of why certain documents were promoted to review.
The User Activity page on an ECA project contains a Promotion tab, where you can view a summary of all promoted documents. Any newly-uploaded documents that match a previous promotion search will appear in the “Matches search now” column of this table.
You can view size totals for your ECA database on the Organization Administrator page, under the Database Sizes tab. You can view the sizes of individual projects on the analytics page, under Project Size.
Integrated pre-production Quality Assurance (QA)
We’ve made some changes to Productions to make it easier than ever to identify and resolve common issues before production, and run productions with greater confidence.
Now, after you’ve created a production protocol, Everlaw will run common quality assurance checks on your protocol settings and the documents you want to produce. On our new pre-production QA page in the Productions page, we will report on any potential issues as well as provide guidance to fix them. You can resolve the issues based on suggested resolutions, or choose to keep or remove the affected documents in the production set.
After you’ve made a decision on each of the QA warnings, you can simply click Produce to begin your production! After a production is initiated, you can come back to the Protocol page at any time to review documents that may have been excluded from previous productions based on production criteria search and protocol.
Learn more about Everlaw’s integrated pre-production QA workflow here.
Direct uploading from Microsoft Office 365
You can now upload Microsoft Office 365 data directly into Everlaw. Office 365 Global Admins can upload Microsoft Outlook, Calendars, Teams, and OneDrive data by selecting Microsoft Office 365 as an option under “Collect from cloud application” on the Native Uploads page. Once logged into Microsoft Office 365, Global Admins can choose which platforms to connect to and which custodians they would like to collect data from, as well as the date range of their desired documents.
Learn more about uploading data from Microsoft Office 365.
Message center and email improvements
Message center improvements
Conversations and messages are now more organized in Everlaw’s message center. You can now add a subject line to a new message, and all replies to an original message will be stored as a single thread. Your message threads are also categorized by new folders. The Message types folders filter threads between yourself and other users, between yourself and Everlaw support, and platform notifications.
The thread with the most recent reply will be displayed at the top of your inbox. Clicking on a thread will expand it, where you can view the previous messages, sender information, and attachments of the thread. From the three-dot menu next to any message in a thread, you can forward the message, reply to it, or split the thread into a new conversation.
Learn more about Everlaw’s message center.
Reply to Everlaw messages in email
You can now reply to Everlaw messages straight from your email inbox without ever having to open Everlaw! Replying to a notification email will automatically create a message in the Everlaw message center. You can also click the “Reply to message” button in the notification email, which will direct you to the appropriate thread within the Everlaw message center.
Standard email designs
Platform messages that are sent as emails will now be styled with Everlaw branding. After joining a new project, completing an upload, receiving a new message on Everlaw, and more, your notification emails will display the Everlaw logo and relevant links. As usual, you can adjust your email preferences in the message center or in Project Settings.
Data visualizer on homepage
You can now view your Data Visualizer dashboard from the homepage by selecting “Document overview” from the left-hand navigation panel. This will allow you to view different data visualizations of all the documents in your project.
Clicking on any of the dashboard cards will take you to the Data Visualizer page, where you can filter and further explore your data. You can also pin and unpin dashboard cards on the Data Visualizer page. Your pinned cards will be reflected in the Document overview.
Project Administrators can set the document overview as the default homepage for new users by toggling the Homepage view setting in Project Settings.
Learn more about the document overview here.
Processed Upload Improvements
Ability to drop multiple files in the PDF uploader
You can now drag and drop multiple files and folders to our processed uploader for PDFs without a load file! You can find this uploader under the “Processed Data” tab in the Uploads page.
Summary Configuration updates and additional table formatting
We’ve added more information to the Summary page for processed uploads. To view a summary of a processed upload, navigate to the completed upload card, click on the three-dot menu, and select “View results.”
In the Summary, you’ll see tabs for documents that were created, changed, and skipped during upload configuration. Each tab will display any documents with errors, and you’ll be able to access a missing files report.
We’ve also updated the tables in the processed uploader to improve scrollability and to make them compatible with screen readers.
Learn more about processed uploads here.
Accessibility improvements
Keyboard navigation
You can now navigate through more pages and elements via keyboard. Using your tab key and shift + tab keys, you can move between many clickable buttons, icons, cards, and pages on the site. The up and down arrow keys can also be used to navigate between menu items. Pressing your spacebar will select checkboxes and radio buttons, and pressing enter will activate most elements. You can also dismiss dialog boxes by pressing the tab key, then the esc key.
Accessible Form Fields
We’ve added alternative text to form fields on high-traffic pages, making them friendly to screen readers.
Learn more about accessibility on Everlaw.
Share dialog improvements
The share dialog now contains more information about permissions. When you share an object, you will now see the current permission levels, if any, next to the names of groups and users in the recipient drop down.
If sharing an object requires access to additional objects, you will have the option to see details without leaving the share dialog. For instance, when you share a search that is dependent on another object, like a predictive coding model or a Draft, recipients can now receive View permissions on the dependent object. Additionally, when sharing a folder, you will be able to specify different permissions for the folder itself and objects in the folder.
Learn more about sharing and object permissions here.
Bates type standard metadata fields
Standard metadata fields with Bates values will now be classified as type Bates instead of type Text. The affected fields include: Begin Family, End Family, Other Bates, Parent ID, and Produced From. You’ll be able to search over these fields by prefix and by range, instead of just by text match.
Learn more about standard metadata fields.
Source file dialog improvements in native upload cards
You can now easily access the documents from each individual source file in a native upload. To do so, simply navigate to the native upload card, click on the three-dot menu, and select “Manage Source Files.” This will bring up the source file dialog. This dialog now includes a “Documents” column containing links to results tables with documents from each source file. You can also download the source files directly from the “Actions” column.
Learn more about uploading native data to Everlaw.