Everlaw for Journalists

Uploading Documents

If you have an administrator uploading data for you, you can skip this step. The first step in uploading data is determining what type of data you’re working with: processed data or native data.

• PDF Documents: You may have one or more large PDF file that contains many individual documents. This is considered processed data. You’ll first want to review this video on uploading your PDFs. Once uploaded, we recommend watching this second video on how to unitize your PDFs. Unitization is the process of identifying which parts of that large PDF are actually individual documents, and breaking those up so that they can more easily be reviewed one by one.

• Non-PDF Documents: If you have data in other formats, such as spreadsheets or emails in their original file format, this is considered native data. Learn how to upload native data here.

• Multiple Data Folders: You may receive processed data that is more complicated than PDF documents alone. You can identify this by looking for a structure similar to the image below: it is likely it will have folders titled data, text, images, and natives. If you have data matching this description, please reach out to either our support team (support@everlaw.com) or your Everlaw point person for support uploading this data to the platform.

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Searching and Filtering

Once your documents are uploaded, Everlaw offers a number of options to search, analyze, and understand them!

• Everlaw Search: You can use Everlaw’s search tool to look for documents with key words, communications sent between a specific time frame, types of documents, and so much more! Review this short video to learn how to use this tool.

• Search Term Reports: Search Term Reports (STRs) allow you to run multiple searches at once across a document set, so that you can compare results side by side or pull all documents for review that match any of your searches criteria. This is a useful tool for exploring your data in the early phases of an investigation. Watch this video to learn how to use this tool.

As you run your searches, you’ll review your results in a Results Table. This 3 minute video goes over navigating a Results Table.

Tip! You can customize your Results Table view to ensure you’re seeing relevant information about your documents, filter based on key characteristics, and more. We highly recommend reviewing this guide to ensure you’re Results Table is configured in the most helpful way for your workflows.

[Optional] Document Analytics

The graph icon in the top toolbar of your Everlaw homepage represents our Document Analytics tools, which are designed to help you better understand, filter, and review your documents. Note that these tools are most effective when any large PDFs have already been separated (unitized), as described in the first lesson of this workflow page.

We recommend exploring the following two tools:

• The Data Visualizer: Here you’ll find visualizations, or graphs, visually showing many of your documents' characteristics. For example, you can view how many spreadsheets you have vs. emails to review, the time period with the most email communication, and more. The Communication Visualizer (available within this tool) gives an in-depth view of who was communicating with whom, which can reveal key players and hidden connections. Learn more here.
  

• Clustering: Are you unsure where to even start in regards to reviewing your data? This tool automatically groups documents together based on similar concepts within their contents. It can be extremely helpful at the start of a new matter to help you understand themes across your documents, find related documents, and decide which documents to begin reviewing first. Learn more here.

Reviewing Your Documents

Ready to begin reviewing your documents? Watch the short video below to learn the core essentials of review on Everlaw. Don’t forget to reference the Terminology Hub for definitions on key terms. 

Looking for hands-on practice? We offer an interactive live training on Document Review every other week. In this hour-long training you’ll be added to a sandbox Everlaw project where you can practice what you’re learning on a dummy set of data, and ask questions of a live trainer in real time. Sign up here!

Tip! If you’re working with one or more people to review your documents, you may consider leveraging our Assignments tool to help batch out documents to each person, monitor review progress, and more. Learn how to create an assignment, and review assigned documents.

Document Organization

When it comes to organizing documents of interest, you’ll want to leverage binders. A binder in Everlaw is similar to a tangible, 3-ring binder you might have on your desk - it is simply a way to group related documents together. A few ideas for leveraging binders may include:

• Binder documents which come from a similar source when working on investigations with multiple sources. This could help provide focus during review.

• Binder (potentially) relevant and/or important documents that require further review.

• Binder documents you’ve deemed irrelevant for the purpose of filtering them out during future searches and review.

This guide goes over how to work with Binders.

As you discover documents that feel meaningful or impactful to your matter, we recommend also adding those documents into our Storybuilder tool. Within Storybuilder you can:

• Create a fact timeline of key events and facts within your matter. Then, link the documents relevant to those facts and events for easy reference.

• Create a condensed list of key documents (evidence).

• Use Labels to filter by key people, events, or themes.

• Create Profiles for people of interest, complete with their name, pictures, employment history and other helpful details.

Watch the video below to learn more about what Storybuilder is and how to add key documents into your Project Story.

[Optional] Storybuilder for Content Creation

In addition to pulling together key documents and fact timelines, Storybuilder is an excellent tool for drafting or building your story. Within Storybuilder you’ll find Drafts and Depositions, which are collaborative note-taking spaces. Never heard of a Deposition? It's another name for an interview. You might leverage these tools to:

• Jot down outstanding questions that require additional research and share them with your colleagues

• Write out the story you want to tell, including referencing key documents or leveraging our AI tools to support with drafting

• Work with, search across, and pull key excerpts from transcripts and recordings of interviews you’ve held. If you need to interview someone, Storybuilder also includes features like a timer, transcript storage, and more.

Learn all about Depositions and Drafts in the video below.

[Optional] Leveraging Everlaw AI

As part of your Everlaw subscription, you may have access to our suite of Generative AI tools, known as Everlaw AI. This includes:

• The Writing Assistant: These tools live within Storybuilder. They include the ability to analyze multiple documents to create new content (lists, memos, etc.), answer questions about or review inconsistencies within a transcript, and more. Learn more here.

• The Review Assistant: These tools live within the Review part of the platform. They include the ability to generate summaries of your documents, create bullet-point lists of major talking points, people and sentiments found in a document, ask custom questions about a specific document, and extract customizable fields of information. Learn more here.

• Deep Dive: Deep Dive needs to be enabled for an entire project at once. Once enabled, you’ll be able to ask questions of your entire document set, or a subset of identified documents of interest, and get timely responses with the specific documents used to generate that response linked and quoted. Learn more here.

If you have any additional questions and/or do not currently have access to Everlaw AI features, please contact your organization’s Everlaw administrator, or your Everlaw point person.