Document search results are normally displayed by one of two means: (1) Relevance – The document matches your search criteria, but how does it “score” compared to other documents that match? (2) Order that you explicitly specified. In many situations, this makes the most sense, but sometimes you want to view document families (i.e. email’s with their attachments) together. One way that we provide this capability is via “Group document families” (on the “Documents” page for TrialCloud; “Review” page for DiscoveryCloud). Selecting this option will group members of the same family together in the search results.
Central to understanding the feature is an understanding of how Nextpoint defines a “document family”. While we believe that an email and it’s attachment are two separate but highly-related documents… we also believe that for features such as de-duplification it’s important to have knowledge of the context of an individual document. Therefore, a document’s “family” is considered to be anything that would typically be expected to be transmitted in a “single package”. For example, an email physically contains the bytes necessary to piece together an attached file — they’re “in a family”. A zip file contains the bytes necessary to re-assemble it’s contents: they’re in a family. A reply to an email does not contain all of the bytes necessary to recreate a true representation of the email it replies to: they’re not in a family.
Are two identical documents considered to be “in a family”? Only if their entire family’s are identical. This most frequently happens when the same document is uploaded multiple-times by-itself , although it will also occur when the exact same email file (with an attached document) is uploaded more than once. Note: Each of these situations is blocked if deduplification is enabled.
The results of the search display document families grouped together and separated by white space. In this example, 2 families are shown: each comprised of a single email and their single attachment.
This feature does not pull any documents into your results that did not match your query, but instead does exactly what is promised: group the results of your search. For example, a hit in an attached Word document would not lead to the Email that attaches it being included in the set, unless the email itself also matched the search criteria. Should you require the capability to pull in related (non-matching) documents, options are available via “Bulk Actions” to accomplish that goal.
Similar to any other sorting option with document search: The order documents are displayed on screen may be relied on to be the same order than any Bulk Actions (including Bates Assignment, etc) will be carried out.
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