About analyzing documents

The ability to analyze documents before starting a document review is critical to the success of any document review. In addition, analyzing documents during the course of a review can assure you that the review is progressing as you expect.

Most reviews require you to cull the original documents using search terms or keywords. This process, however, is more of an art than a science. Items that are in the initial keyword list frequently need to be modified, changed, or deleted, depending on the results.

Although statistical reporting is valuable during initial case assessment and for prioritizing documents for review and coding, document analysis can provide a quick overview of the responsiveness of each keyword. You can also compare keyword responsiveness to other data items, such as custodians, dates, issues, or document type.

The document analysis tools in the application allow you to work with data in the case database. For example, you can determine how often a term appears in documents, or you can locate information about a specific person, place, or time. You can view key concepts in clusters of related documents, organize case data in a spreadsheet-like summary of rows and columns, create sets of documents for predictive coding, and assess small sets of documents to compare to larger sets.

You can analyze documents in the following ways:

Evaluate a document set in a spreadsheet format. For example, you can identify documents that meet particular combinations of criteria, and copy documents to the Working list for further action. Review leads can use cubes to identify important documents quickly for early case assessment. For more information, see Assess document sets using cubes.

Analyze document content by exploring a visual representation of the important concepts in documents. For example, you can explore groups of related documents and examine document relationships that are not obvious with a standard search or during an initial review. For more information, see Analyze document content using mines.

View the email communication patterns between people and organizations using the social network analytics feature. This feature is well suited for early case assessment and investigations where you are not sure what you are looking for. For more information, see Analyze communications using social network analytics.