When you’re searching through a universe of evidence in a trial, sometimes one search word or phrase isn’t enough to sufficiently narrow your results. Nextpoint’s search fields use Boolean Logic to allow to tailor your results to exactly what you’re looking for.
For instance, say you’d like to see documents about the infringement of Patent ’123. Instead of entering Patent ’123 infringement and hoping that key phrase appears in the documents you’re looking for, you can enter “Patent’ 123″ AND “Infringement.” The second search will return a more complete results.
Boolean logic also allows you to use the text box search to filter documents. For instance, if you’re looking for documents by an expert witness, searching for Smith in the text box search will turn up all documents that mention the word Smith anywhere in the text. Try typing in Author:Smith, this will return only documents that have been coded as authored by witness Smith.
Here are a few other Boolean Tips and Tricks:
To search in a particular coding field, enter the name of the field, a colon, and the text.
Examples:
- date:January 12, 2007
- author:smith
To find a phrase, enclose the phrase in quotes.
Examples:
- “John Joseph Smith”
- author:”John Joseph Smith”
Using + and – operators, you can require a term to be matched, or exclude items for which it matches, respectively.
Examples:
- smith +patent -invention (matches patent but not invention, scoring matches of smith higher)
- smith -author:smith (matches smith unless the item was authored by smith)
Boolean Combinations
To search for specific combinations of terms, you can use the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. AND and OR will be automatically capitalized for you, but you must enter NOT in all-caps to use it as an operator instead of the word not. For best results, use parenthesis to group the combinations together.
Examples:
- author:(smith OR jones)
- smith AND (patent OR invention)
- (author:smith AND kind:(email OR conversation)) or (author:jones AND date:October 10, 2007)
- (author:smith AND NOT kind:email) or (author:jones AND NOT designated:defense)
There are two wildcards available for matching terms. The question mark (?) will match any single character (letter/number/etc.), whereas the asterisk (*) will match any sequence of zero or more characters.
Examples:
- author:john* (matches john, johnson, johnsen, etc.)
- jar?d (matches jared, jarod, etc.)
- date:2007-06-* (matches any date in June 2007)
Dates
For the date field, you have multiple options, including searching before/after specific dates. Prefixing a less-than (<) or greater-than (>) operator to the date will search for dates before or after the specified one, respectively. Adding an equals-sign after the operator will match dates on or before or on or after the specified one.
Examples:
- date:<2007-07-13 (matches dates before July 13, 2007)
- date:>=2007-07-13 (matches dates on or after July 13, 2007)
- kind:deposition date:>=2007-07-01 date:<2007-09-01 (matches depositions in July and August, 2007)
Note: in general, dates must be written as yyyy-mm-dd, but Nextpoint will translate some common date formats for you when doing basic field searches.
