Tips for Paralegals and Litigation Support Professionals

Sean O’Shea: Tips for Paralegals and Litigation Support Professionals – December 2021

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12/1/2021:Number of Examples to Use for Categorization
Relativity suggests that a minimum of 5 to 20 documents be used for any one category, and that as many as 15,000 documents can be effectively used as examples for a single category.

12/2/2021: Clustering Rights
Before running clustering analytics in Relativity, be sure to confirm that you have the necessary permissions:

  1. The admin should set rights to ‘add’ for the field, choice, and cluster set objects.
  2. Rights must be assigned for the clustering mass operation.

12/3/2021: Color coding your emails

12/4/2020: Automatic Creation of Categories and Examples
When the ‘Create Categories and Examples’ button is clicked on the console . . . Relativity will clear all existing examples and categories.

12/5/2021: Categorization Results
After categorization is run in Relativity, the name of the categorization set will be modified by adding ‘Categories’ to the beginning of the categorization set’s name.

12/6/2021: creating folders in Relativity
Note that in the load file for a new production, the field named, ‘Folder Info’ will contain data that will generate a folder structure in the workspace. Each folder level will be separated with a backslash.

12/7/2021: Google and Kissinger: The Singularity is Coming
Today I watched a Zoom webinar on which Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt discussed artificial intelligence and the future of human civilization. If you want to grab an attorney’s attention about the likelihood that AI will change the way the world works, you could do worse than to point out that Nixon’s international relations consigliere and ego stroker, and one of the founders of Google are concerned enough about the possibility of a technological singularity (in which AI will begin to rapidly upgrade itself independently of human control (like in Terminator, but hopefully with better results)) to co-author a book about it, The Age of AI.

12/8/2021: Relativity Trace
In addition to its document review platform, Relativity markets its Trace platform which gives businesses a way to monitor their employees’ communications for compliance issues., with a particular focus on securities regulations.   The system can be set to find improper use of PII, sales fraud, or simply focus on customer complaints. 

12/9/2021: regex search to increment each number by one
The search works by increasing each number that ends with a digit from 1 to 8 by one, and then adding a tag with tilde, ‘~’ in front of digits which end with a 9 and for which the preceding digit will have to also be increased by one.

12/10/2021: regex searching for optional strings
Don’t miss that with a question mark you can make a search for a string optional in a regular expression search. 

 dog(wood)?

12/11/2021: regex to move string to the end of a line
This regular expression will take a string at the beginning of a line of text and move it to the end of the line.

FIND: (\r\s{3,})([0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2})(.*$)

REPLACE: \1 \3 \2

12/12/2021: to filter out email headers, don’t remove footers
When creating an analytics index in Relativity, keep in mind that the option for the email header filter will only be enabled, when the setting to ‘Remove English signatures and footers’ to set to ‘No’.

12/13/2021: Formula to find whether or not a number falls between ranges listed in two columns
=LOOKUP(2,1/((A5>=G:G)*(A5<=H:H)),I:I)

The LOOKUP formula looks up the value given in cell A5 first in column G to see if it is greater or equal to a value there, and then in column H to see if it is less than or equal to a value there.

12/14/2021: redacting multiple excel files in Relativity
Relativity’s redaction tool can transfer the redactions made in one Excel file to Excel files which have duplicate hash values. 

12/15/2021: left margin black squares formatting detail in MS Word
When editing a Word document you may come across small black boxes or squares in the left margin when formatting symbols are displayed.   It may not be possible to relocate text which includes these marks to other parts of the document.  The ‘black box’ symbol indicates that the text has been formatted so the lines are kept together.

12/16/2021: add page numbering in NotePad++

12/17/2021: RAND Study on Electronic Discovery Costs
“In one case, for example, seven teams of attorneys, all trained in a similar manner and given the same instructions, examined 28,000 documents organized into 12,000 clusters to judge whether the clusters were responsive to the facts of the case. Results showed that the teams agreed only 23 to 54 percent of the time, depending on the pair of teams being compared.”

12/18/2021: Selectable, but unsearchable text in a PDF
If this happens, in Acrobat under Edit . . . Preferences . . . Search, click the ‘Purge Cache Contents’ option.

12/19/2021: regex search to find a string when it repeats X number of times
^(?!(.*?x){4})(?=.*x).*$

This search will find the string ‘X’, entered after the first ? and then at the end of the second parentheses, whenever it appears Y number of times successively, Y being one less than the number entered in the curly brackets.

12/20/2021: CISA checklist
Coordinate with the CISA and receive a CISA National Cyber Incident Scoring System (NCISS) priority level.

12/21/2021: Clean metadata from multiple PDF files
Set up an Adobe Acrobat action to scrub the metadata from multiple PDF files. Under Tools . . . Action Wizard . . . Create New Action, select the option in the Protection section for ‘Remove Hidden Information’. Bring it over to the right, and then after being sure to uncheck ‘Prompt User’ so the action doesn’t make you save each PDF, click on Specify Settings. You will probably want to uncheck the options for ‘Bookmarks’ and ‘Links’ since the final version of a PDF of a court filing may need to retain these features.

12/22/2021: regex search for one or more instances of a character set
When you add a plus sign ‘+’ after characters identified within square brackets in a regular expression search, the search will find any instances where one or more of these characters appear.

12/23/2021: WWID
A WWID (World Wide Identifier) number is used to keep track of storage devices.

12/24/2021: More than one way to cluster in Relativity . . .
Clustering is a Relativity analytics process which is performed by selecting Cluster from the mass operations menu:  Another way to perform clustering automatically is to set the option to cluster documents when creating a conceptual index:

12/25/2021: Steve Donziger’s Failure to Submit a Privilege Log Basis for Forensic Inspection Protocol
“Donziger unjustifiably has refused to comply with his discovery obligations. Had he done so — i.e., had he produced responsive documents as to which there was no colorable claim of privilege, submitted a privilege log as to responsive documents as to which there was such a colorable claim, and submitted any disputes for judicial resolution – there would be no need to examine his ESI.” Chevron Corporation v. Donziger, 425 F. Supp. 3d 297, 306 (S.D.N.Y. 2019)

12/26/2021: Distinguishing between cluster coherence scores and document object cluster scores
The Analytics engine will generate a field which will show each document object’s coherence score for a given cluster.  This score shows a document’s coherence score within the cluster.  The coherence score used in the field tree for a cluster indicates how conceptually similar all of the documents in a cluster are.  The document object cluster coherence score shows how far the document is from the middle of the cluster.

12/27/2021: Decreasing the duration of a clustering operation
Note that selecting the option to create a cluster score on each document object in the source set when performing the cluster mass operation will lead to the Analytics engine taking far longer to complete the process. 

12/28/2021: How to keep an image in place in Excel
You can solve this problem by right-clicking on the graphic and selecting . . . Size and Properties . . . and then in the Properties drop down menu choosing the radio button for ‘Move and size with cells’.

12/29/2021: regex search for between X and Y instances of characters
A regular expression search for a string between X and Y numbers can be structured by following the character search by two numbers in curley brackets separated by a comma. So this search:

\r\n[A-Za-z]{2,3}\r\n

. . . will find any instances of a word between 2 and 3 letters which is listed on one line.

12/30/2021: Counting up attachments using IF . . . THEN
The IF . . . THEN formula looks for instances where the adjacent cell begins with ‘file name’, and if it does enters the first 15 characters from the cell above (the parent file name minus the file extension), three leading zeroes, and the attachment number referenced in column E. If column C indicates that it’s a parent and not an attachment, the formula simply enters the value in cell C2.

12/31/2021: Pull from the right of a cell until the first instance of a delimiter is reached
=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-FIND(“|”,SUBSTITUTE(A2,”/”,”|”,LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,”/”,””))),1))

This formula can be made to work by swapping in any delimiter in place of the forward slash (/).

Sean O'Shea on Email
Sean O'Shea
Litigation Paralegal
Sean O’Shea began working as a litigation support analyst at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP in 1998, near the dawn of the electronic discovery era. From assisting clients with the implementation of information governance policies, to conducting electronic presentations for attorneys at trials, he has been involved in all aspects of litigation support work. Sean is a Relativity Certified Administrator and an ACEDS Certified E-Discovery Specialist. He’s currently employed as a litigation paralegal in New York City, and continues to advise attorneys on legal technology. Look for a new tip on each night on www.litigationsupporttipofthenight.com.

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