What s Old Is New A Peek At Concordance Andy Kass

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1 Concordance Tip Sheet February 2014 What s Old Is New A Peek At Concordance Andy Kass This is generally where I d report on Legal Tech New York 2014, held this year on February 4-6 at The Hilton in New York. I will address that wrap-up separately, because the mission of this blog demands that I share the news about a re-energized new release of traditional Concordance, Version I got a sneak peek at the upcoming release, slated for June 2014, along with its companion, Concordance Native Viewer 1.08, from Wil Cummings, a long-time Concordance technical resource and now Concordance product manager. For those who don t know Wil, he is one of those people whose enthusiasm seems almost oldfashioned, and I mean that in a good way. He has brought a philosophy of fix it now, and then enhance it to the Concordance development team, and he is surveying users to hear what manifestly needs fixing. So here s a quick tour of what s coming from Concordance in June: 1. FIND ATTACHMENTS One of the major workflow headaches in Concordance has been the need to stop after a search and run a CPL script (and not a particularly fast CPL, either) called FindAttachments in order to gather all family members for a retrieved document. There were faster options, such as Trent Walton s Super Attach.CPL, that still involved a special effort to run a script, and still involved using bulk tagging under the hood to assemble the set. Along with the extra time and inconvenience, this opened up a potential instability: if several users were searching and finding attachments at the same time, the multiple simultaneous bulk tagging operations would hammer the TRK file (the core control file of a Concordance database).

2 Concordance Tip Sheet February In Concordance 10.20, the SEARCH menu has a new Find Attachments item. Constant readers may recall my September 2009 Tip Sheet called Family Gathering, in which I described entering the name of the field which identified a family perhaps it is BEGATTACH, or BEGATT, or FAMILYRANGE. Now that information can be set under TOOLS / Preferences, or in the Import Wizard, so that the collection of attachments for a search set may be run at any time. It may even have a Hotkey assignment by the June release. But wait, there s more! There will be an addition to the Tag context menu; in addition to Tag All Documents in Query there will be Tag All Documents in Query with Attachments, whether they have already been added to the view or not. In terms of performance, where FindAttachments.CPL used an iterative search on a Key field (say, BEGATTACH) that is, a field defined as TEXT30 because it was a known, fixed length the new menu-driven process uses a full-text search on what is now defined as a Paragraph (long text, indexed) field to speed up processing and cut down on the number of processing cycles involved in identifying and retrieving each set. But you don t need to care about that stuff under the hood now. It just works as part of the core program. 2. EDIT LAYOUTS My Concordance Admin students will I hope recall my admonition that the order of fields set up under FILE / Modify would dictate the BROWSE viewing, and more directly the EDIT coding, experience of users forever and anon unless changed by the administrator with everyone else kicked off the database. A lack of foresight in placement of an ATTYNOTE field, for example, might doom users of a large database to waiting out a long table transfer and then a full Index before the changed field order could be used. Now there is a drop-down arrow next to the EDIT button, much as there is next to the TABLE button in the Main Toolbar, and for the same reason: you can create or change multiple Edit layouts. The Edit Layout screen looks a lot like the Table Layout screen, except that the results are shown as editable slots set out in the customary vertical form. One may also right-click in the Edit screen and select Show all fields. This is a boon to Admins, and a time-saver to reviewers, who now only need to deal with fields they are actually meant to code under EDIT.

3 Concordance Tip Sheet February SORT LAYOUTS The SORT function has been moved from the Task Pane to the Main Toolbar, where it has also acquired a Layout drop-down button. This makes it easier to select which fields will be displayed in which order when doing a multi-field sort. 4. PERSISTENT SEARCH HIT HIGHLIGHTING This is a cool capability some hosted tools have offered for some time. Here s how it will work with Concordance: (a) Create a TXT file with up to 250 full-text search terms (one per line). (b) Sorry, no operators (yet). (c) Save the TXT file in the Concordance DCB s folder as <name>_persistent.txt. (d) In the Search Options Pane, click the checkbox for Persistent Search. (e) Highlighted terms will appear as you go through documents. (f) PERSISTENT will appear in the Status Bar at the window s bottom. (g) You can set the Persistent Search Highlight Color under TOOLS / Preferences (default is blue), in the same place where you set the Current Search Highlight Color (default is red). (h) Selecting ALL from Main Toolbar turns off Persistent Search. Further improvements are contemplated in this capability as Concordance continues to evolve. 5. EDOC IMPORTER Remember how this convenience tool used to split the several worksheets in an Excel file into separate documents. Fixed! In addition, the Import Wizard, which now looks only at DAT files, will be looking for other types of material to load and branch the import workflow accordingly. 6. TAG BACKUP AND RESTORE Concordance has long had a CPL called TagSaver, which could sometimes be called LiveSaver ; this utility backed up tags for each document related by the field containing the unique control number, saved them to a file called <databasename>.gat

4 Concordance Tip Sheet February in the DCB s folder, and could restore them quickly (albeit with the administrator plugged in as the user setting the tags). Now a more advanced version of this tool has been added to the TOOLS menu. Not only does it backup (even while the database and tagging are in use) and restore, but it can be set to send an alert to an administrator if the TRK file is becoming corrupt. There is also a TRK file cleanup utility baked in here. For administrative stuff that most people don t ever think about, this is huge. 7. CONCORDANCE NATIVE VIEWER 1.08 There will be a new Concordance Native Viewer, version 1.08, released with Concordance The big deal right away is the addition of Sticky Zoom and Sticky Rotate to CNV. These were two of the most popular viewing features in Concordance Image: the ability to set a magnification level (Sticky Zoom) and page orientation (Sticky Rotate). Better yet, if you turn them off, then turn them back on, they remember the last settings assigned to them. With the release of a new Brava viewer, further improvements are anticipated in cleaning up zoom, resolution, and JPG production handling. SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Concordance is not going away. It is still a primary review tool for small-tomidsized law firms (and many larger firms as well). Its file formats are used by many if not most other document review vendors, making this a prime quality checking tool in addition to its review and production duties. Government agencies as well continue to require an installable software application for document review. From what I ve seen of the next release, Concordance will continue to be a cornerstone of litigation support for some time to come. Legal Tech report to follow soon! The views expressed in this Concordance Tip Sheet are solely the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of U.S. Legal Support, Inc. The Concordance Tip Archive (all the way back to October 2005!) lives on at our Web Site, Feel free to leave me a note, a comment, a suggestion or a Tip request. While you re there, don t miss our

5 Concordance Tip Sheet February Resources page, which lists the Tip Sheet Archive and our current CLE offerings, and of course, check into all the other great things U.S. Legal Support can do for you. -- Andy Kass akass@uslegalsupport.com U.S. LEGAL SUPPORT, INC. ESI & Litigation Services PROVIDING EXPERT SOLUTIONS FROM DISCOVERY TO VERDICT e-discovery Document Collection & Review Litigation Management Litigation Software Training Meet & Confer Advice Court Reporting Services At Trial Electronic Evidence Presentation Trial Consulting Demonstrative Graphics Courtroom & War Room Equipment Deposition & Case Management Services Record Retrieval Copyright 2014 U.S. Legal Support, Inc., 425 Park Avenue, New York NY (800) All rights reserved. To update your address or unsubscribe from these mailings, please reply to this with CANCEL in the subject line.