Administrating LAW PreDiscovery: Tips and Tricks

Whether you’re new to LAW PreDiscovery or an advanced user, you may find this article helpful and may even uncover valuable information to help in your current eDiscovery process. I’ve highlighted a few core administrative functions within LAW PreDiscovery and their benefits to you as an end user.

  • Reviewing Errors and Tagging: You’re in the middle of an enormous TIFF job and suddenly the amount of errors in the progress bar starts to quickly grow. You will either let the batch process continue until the job is completed, or you’ll panic and cancel the job. Your main goal is to identify which documents caused the errors and why. In LAW PreDiscovery, you can use the Log Viewer to verify errors and warnings that occurred during the batch process. In addition, the Log Viewer can be saved in .csv format. You can also synchronize the Log Viewer with LAW’s main interface. One of the most helpful functions of the Log Viewer is its tagging capabilities. Tagging can be done by selection of records or all records.

What is the advantage of Log Viewer? By using LAW PreDiscovery’s Log Viewer and its tagging feature, this can save time in identifying problematic records. Once you’ve tagged the records, you can easily run a query using that same tag to locate the problematic documents.

  • Custom Message Killer: You have thousands of emails and edocs that were handed to you for processing. You start the TIFF process in LAW and you notice a popup window regarding the security certificate that cannot be verified. The prompt will likely ask if you’d like to continue or not. In LAW PreDiscovery, a popup message can interrupt the batch process if you do not select an action (Yes or No). Note that different prompts are generated for different file types. The Message Killer feature in LAW can automatically identify which messages to look for and select the action for you. Once you’ve identified which messages are being generated, you can set up a custom Message Killer by creating it in XML File format.

What is the advantage of the Custom Message Killer? When working with a large data set, monitoring each job manually and closing each message as they are generated can be very time consuming. With LAW PreDiscovery’s custom Message Killer, you do not have to manually select an action from every popup that is generated. Your custom Message Killer will take care of that for you.For instructions on how to create a Message Killer visit: http://help.lexisnexis.com/litigation/ac/law/law6.8/index.html?creating_message_killer.htm

  • LAW Management Console (LMC): You have 50 GB of data that needs to go out for production tomorrow. You have several workstations available to use for this case but you are the only individual assigned to get this job done. LMC is a utility that can be used to manage distributed processing in LAW PreDiscovery. A distributed process in LAW means that you’re allowing other resources (workstations) to join a specific job such as Import, TIFF/PDF and OCR. In the LMC, you can monitor and manage workstations, processing jobs, and licenses. Error logs, messages and debugging information can also be generated.

What is the advantage of using LMC? LMC can help with large projects especially if you are given a tight deadline. With multiple workstations assigned to a single job with the ability to manage jobs from a single workstation, you can complete your project faster than if you were to process from one machine.

  • Email notifications: Processing in LAW PreDiscovery can be time consuming depending on the size of your data and what type of guidelines you are given to follow. You may find yourself juggling different projects on a daily basis and working in different eDiscovery platforms. In LAW PreDiscovery, the notifications feature can help you keep track of the processing status for your cases. A simple SMPTP configuration within LAW PreDiscovery is necessary in order to use this feature. You can input the email addresses of recipients and select what type of event (Batch Complete, Import Complete, and Export Complete). Notifications are sent via email that contains the batch type, batch status, total items, error count, elapsed time, and total pages (if applicable). These notifications can be set up globally or on a case level.

What is the advantage of email notifications? Multi-task while LAW is batch processing. Alert key personnel or yourself when ED loader Imports, Batch Processes, or Exports have completed so that you can move forward with the project.

  • Extracting Custom Metadata after ED Loader Import: Capturing Custom Metadata during an eDiscovery process can be an important step in your workflow. There are advanced metadata options in LAW PreDiscovery’s ED Loader that can achieve this goal. These options must be enabled prior to the ED Loader import process in order to capture custom metadata. A couple years ago, if you forgot to enable the options and completed the import, the only way to extract custom metadata is to go back, enable the options, and reimport. Today, you can extract metadata in LAW by running a batch process called Document Processing/Analysis. Same options are available such as capturing custom metadata, detection for comments, track changes, speaker notes, and hidden slides/sheets/rows/columns. There are two other options that are not available within ED Loader’s metadata settings: Detect bookmarks in Adobe PDF files and Split document on bookmarks.

What is the advantage of the Custom Metadata extraction after import? Imagine if you spent the last 10 hours ingesting in LAW and realized you never turned on the option to capture custom metadata for your PDF and MS Office files. With LAW’s Document Processing/Analysis, you don’t have to take a huge step back in your project. With the given situation, you can save a huge amount of time by using LAW’s batch process to extract custom metadata.