Labels, Issues, and Tags- Oh My!

Nextpoint offers numerous ways for trial teams to organize and sort documents. But with so many options, how do you chose the best one(s) for your purposes? Here, we’ll give you a run down of what each option is designed to do.

Labels- Labels are party-specific notations. Create and use these to differentiate between important documents for the plaintiff and defense, objections and counters for each side, etc.

Issues- Issues refer to the items in questions in a trial. You might want to flag all documents that pertain to Contracts Performance or all the case materials you have for witness Morganfield. In any case, they help to denote aspects of a case that are more specific than party-based.

Coding fields- Coding refers to the notations a document is given in the document upload process. This might be done in another application before documents are uploaded to Nextpoint, in which case the coding will be imported, or after an upload occurs. Coding covers areas such as Bates Range, Document Author, and Document Production Date. Coding also allows for more specific Boolean search capabilities down the road.

Tag fields- Do you want to code your documents with a certain notation, but don’t see the option in the coding field? No problem! Tags are fully customizable coding fields, where you can create and apply your tag of choice. How’s that for user-friendly?

System data- System data is not necessarily a method of flagging or marking documents, but rather a way to retrieve documents by batch number or last date updated.

Now armed with your new knowledge of the superb document management capabilities of Nextpoint, go forth…and organize!

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Learning the Ropes in Theater

Powerful and persuasive documents are our clients’ keys to telling their story. However, business and legal documents can be longwinded and complicated. Visual aids like document treatments can help to highlight the important paragraphs and ideas. The Theater component of Nextpoint was built to address this issue. Here are some tips, tricks and shortcuts to using Theater effectively.

Basics
Click on the Theater link at the top left of Nextpoint to Launch the presentation window. To call up a document type the Bates number (ex: C00013) or exhibit number (ex: D-2 or P-30) into the gray box in the top left corner. The page will appear. Use your mouse to click and draw a box around the section you would like to emphasize; Theater will automatically call this box out. You can make several call out boxes, just continue drawing boxes around the text you’d like to call out on the original document image. (You can click on the document to bring it to the front if your first callout covers the text you want.) Use your mouse again to draw a box around any word or phrase of particular importance; Theater will turn a box made inside the callout box into highlights.

A Few Annotation Shortcuts (to be used once you have a called out section)
Underline – Hold the “Shift” key while you use your mouse to draw a red underline.
Whiteout box – Hold the “W” key while you use your mouse to create a whiteout box.

Document Tricks
Go to the following page – Press “n” & “>” (no need to use shift)
Go to the proceeding page – Press “p” & “<” (no need to use shift)
Undo a callout/highlight – Press “z” or “u”
Redo a callout/highlight – Press “y”
Clear all callouts – Press “c”
Reveal all callouts – Press “r”
Close the document – Press “Esc”

Saving and Using Saved Doc Treatments
Theater allows you to pre-create document treatments and either download them for use or reuse them later. Once there are saved doc treatments for a particular document, a notice will appear next to the “?” button that says “(_ saved treatments)”. Here are the keystroke shortcuts:
To save your doc treatment for reuse in Theater – Press “s”
To view a saved treatment in Theater – Press the number of the saved treatment (ex: “1” or “2”)
To download a callout – Press “d” and select the callout you would like to download. A window will pop up asking whether you want to open or save. If you choose to save, the image will download directly to your desktop. From there you can import it into PowerPoint or wherever you may want to use it.

It’s a lot to remember, but don’t fret; if you forget these commands there is a cheat sheet available right in Theater. The “?” button provides you a list of keystroke shortcuts. Happy Highlighting!

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Harnessing the Power of Boolean Search Logic

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.

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Nextpoint’s Ken Obel Featured in Law Practice Today

Happy holidays! Nextpoint’s General Counsel Ken Obel was featured in the ABA publication Law Practice Today. In his article, Ken highlights how Nextpoint is delivering cost-effective and strategic advantages to its customers by optimizing core litigation processes. We hope you enjoy the read and wish you a very Happy New Year!

All I Want For The Holidays… Internet-Powered Law

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