Templates are very useful in our day-to-day work life. We use them for email, Word documents, and spreadsheets. They can take the form of canned script language, design documents, and database schemes, and these forms save us time, keep our work product consistent, and give us a starting point for new projects. It also makes it easier for newer team members to learn how to complete less familiar tasks.
Most eDiscovery review products have the ability to templatize databases. In particular, Axcelerate Review & Analysis™ (R&A) gives standard template options like fields, field values and tag arrangements. But it also allows for extending automation features that I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post.
Template Setup
Creating a template R&A is very easy. It is just about creating a new project and setting it up with all the desired options. Or, just identifying an existing R&A to use as a basis for your new project.
The source R&A project will need to be designated as a global template by checking the box “Use as global template” on the project’s Details page within MindServer Admin.
Create the R&A as usual with the Create New Review Interface wizard. On the Template page of this wizard, select Existing as Template Type and use the drop-down box underneath to select your source R&A. Complete the wizard as normal. Once the project is completed, be sure to drop the template so future back-end changes to your source R&A won’t affect the new R&A.
It is also important that the source R&A is running prior to starting the new R&A for the first time. This will complete the cloning process on the front-end.
R&A Elements Available for Cloning
The below customizations are captured from the source R&A and cloned into the target R&A:
- Fields and field values
- Tag arrangements
- Coding rules
- Pre-conversion rules in order to precache images for viewing
- Universes, review workflows, and batching templates to pre-can both standard review process and automation
- Production workflows and export templates to pre-can rules for handling document review productions
- Review in Context settings
- Translation target language settings
- Custom regex pattern searches for enrichment and bulk redaction
Use Cases
The benefits of utilizing R&A templates are multifaceted. Not only do you maintain consistency across projects, you will be baking in efficiency gains for your project teams. It is also a great way to ease new team members into complex setups like automation. Here are a few use cases:
- Create canned document review automation features for all R&A projects. This will allow new projects to be preliminarily set up for:
- batching templates;
- review workflows with active searches to aid in moving documents from one review path to another (e.g., First Pass Review to Privilege Review);
- auto generation of new predictive coding iterations; and
- auto generation of new batches for review.
- Create canned production workflows to ensure consistency in filtering out privileged records and handling of special items, like large Excel files (this feature works best with canned tagging arrangements to allow for consistent search and filter parameters).
- Create canned review universes to carve out data sets into practical segments (e.g., incoming production sets, audio/video files, issue based, etc.).
- Create canned Regular Expression terms that can serve to both capture additional metadata and be used to bulk redact records.
- Ensure pre-caching of images for larger documents to improve review performance.
While this post is primarily about best use of template R&As, you can also create some very dynamic Ingestion/ECA project templates as well. These can include post processors to capture new metadata (e.g., geo locations, appointment times for calendar items, etc.), customize new fields to capture values based on other fielded information (e.g., special sortable date values, custom values to meet production requirements, etc.), add custom Smart Filters, and so much more.
Your OpenText team is available to provide guidance on developing the best templates for your team and, ultimately, save you a lot of time.
