Abby Rosenbloom and I decided to write a series of articles together related to the infamous world of managing a document review. There are no standards. There are best practices. There are personal preferences. There are lessons learned. I have known Abby for over 15 years. We have worked in
This fast tip demonstrates one way to convert a date-time value to date-only in Excel. Download Sample Files
This fast tip demonstrates how to view different parts of one PDF file at the same time.
Name: Brad Lynch Location: Columbia, SC What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? I initially set off to be a computer programmer, so I began my career working for a well-known area software company. I started working in the mail department and delivered inter-office
This fast tip demonstrates how easy it is to convert an existing form in MS Word format to a PDF form. Download Sample Files
In previous articles, I discussed the Legal Hold, the Subpoena or CID, the custodian Identification process and Chain of Custody. Now we need to discuss a very important part of the collection process. In terms of best practices, any data collection should be handled very carefully to avoid changing the data
This fast tip demonstrates how to easily spot patterns using more than simply adding color to a cell. Download Sample Files
This fast tip demonstrates how to use an efficient mouse selection technique. Download Sample Files
The overall goal for a document review is for the document categorization to be as accurate/consistent as possible and for the review to be completed in a timely fashion. As a litigation support professional, one of my favorite project management tasks is managing a large document review. Designing an efficient
This fast tip demonstrates a built-in feature with MS Word that will insert sample (filler) text that can be used to assist with a training session or designing a template document. The Lorem Ipsum text comes from the publishing and graphic design industries. Each version of MS Word will insert
This is an adaptation of an article posted on the Excel Esquire site. This scenario happens often in the middle of a litigation matter. Attorneys will make a list of relevant document numbers and only include the part of the number that is different. But in order for a paralegal
Most people are aware that PDF files can easily be saved to MS Word files in order to edit or reformat the file contents. In this fast tip, I demonstrate that Adobe Acrobat also does a good job of saving charts or tables in PDF to MS Excel. Download Sample
I celebrated my birthday a few days ago. Four years ago, I launched LitigationSupportGuru.com on my birthday. When I reflect back on the past four years, I am proud of the impact this site has had on so many individuals. I have met some wonderful people that I would not
This fast tip demonstrates how to export Excel comments to an MS Word document. The list of comments will also include the cell reference and the comment author. Download Sample Files
Name: Sean O’Shea Location: New York, NY What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? I temped for law firms in New York, Tokyo and San Francisco from 1996 to 1998, mainly coding documents the old fashioned way. This was my first exposure to the
This fast tip demonstrates how to use the freeze panes feature in MS Excel.
This fast tip demonstrates one particular way to use the fill handle in Excel. Download Sample Files Source: David Carns
David Carns is an attorney, technologist, and fan of all things eDiscovery. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. My friend David is much geekier than me. This is a topic that many litigation support professionals probably haven’t had the time to grasp yet, but it is coming up more often during
Name: Jon Canty Location: Washington, DC What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? I was doing desktop support to pay for school. It was a win95/98 environment when I started so there was much suffering for both users and administrators. How did you get
Once redactions have been added to a PDF file, if someone has a different preference for how the redactions should be formatted, this fast tip demonstrates how to bulk edit the redaction properties. Download Sample Files
If you still burn data to CDs or DVDs, you will need to print disk labels. This fast tip demonstrates how to use a free software program called Avery DesignPro to create the disk labels. Download Sample Files
One of my favorite features in MS Word is Format Painter. This fast tip demonstrates how to use it in two ways. Download Sample Files
Abby Rosenbloom and I decided to write a series of articles together related to the infamous world of managing a document review. There are no standards. There are best practices. There are personal preferences. There are lessons learned. I have known Abby for over 15 years. We have worked in
We often receive AutoCAD files in litigation matters. They are architectural diagrams and usually require special software to view them. This fast tip demonstrates how to use a free software program called DWG TrueView to open the files and optionally export them to PDF format if desired. Download Sample Files
This fast tip demonstrates how to use conditional formatting in Excel to highlight duplicate rows, sometimes referred to as duplicate records. In a previous Fast Tip Friday, I demonstrated how to highlight duplicate values using Excel. Download Sample Files
Two people. Both have worked in litigation support for many years. They live about 9,800 miles apart. They have a 14 hour time difference between them. They met online. No, not on one of those dating sites — they met because of this Litigation Support Guru site. One of the most wonderful
Mike Hamilton is a senior manager of e-discovery programs at Exterro. He is a legal and marketing professional with a passion and focus for creating thoughtful, out-of-the-box campaigns that advance e-discovery education and best practices. He holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Oregon School of Law. Find him
This fast tip demonstrates how to use conditional formatting in Excel to highlight duplicate values within a column of data. In another Fast Tip Friday, I demonstrated how to highlight duplicate rows using Excel. Download Sample Files
Name: Evan Benjamin Location: Philadelphia, PA What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? People do not believe the path I took to get here – I was an accountant who jumped into computer networking, and then I jumped into computer forensics, and then I jumped
We often receive videos that are in VOB format and we would prefer to convert them to a more user friendly MP4 format that plays on more devices. This fast tip demonstrates how to easily convert the file using Handbrake. Download Sample Files
A while back I wrote an article entitled A Text File Disguised as a Load File. It is the most read article on this site. Why? Because as the article states, there are many overlapping meanings for the same term and it can be tricky for a newbie to learn all
This fast tip demonstrates how to create a split zip archive. This is useful if the one large zip file is too large to email or it won’t fit on a single CD. For more information, see my Tools of the Trade series 7-Zip article.
Have you ever wondered what is taking up so much space on your hard drive? Have you ever wanted to get an overview of the file contents that just arrived on an external drive? This fast tip demonstrates how to use Treesize Free to break down hard disk space usage
Mike Hamilton is a senior manager of e-discovery programs at Exterro. He is a legal and marketing professional with a passion and focus for creating thoughtful, out-of-the-box campaigns that advance e-discovery education and best practices. He holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Oregon School of Law. Find him
This fast tip will demonstrate how to create a full-text index across folders and subfolders of PDF files. This enables the user to run searches across all of the PDF files at once, including bookmarks and comments if desired. In last week’s Fast Tip Friday, I demonstrated how to use
Sometimes we receive very large PDF files with thousands of pages and of course we then need to run searches within the file. When the PDF file is very large, each search can take a while to run. This fast tip demonstrates how to use an embedded index to increase
Have you ever needed to add the same subfolder to a bunch of existing folders? For instance, let’s say you have a list of folders that are named by custodian and you need to add an Exhibits subfolder to each and every custodian folder. This fast tip demonstrates how to
Name: David Hancock Location: Tampa, FL What kind of work were you doing before litigation support found you? I was a Litigation Paralegal for 15 years prior to transitioning to the Litigation Support world, when Litigation Support became “a thing”. How did you get the opportunity to join the litigation
This fast tip will demonstrate how to rename generically numbered TIFF files to filenames that include a prefix and zero padding. The tool is a free software program called Bulk Rename Utility. Download Sample Files
In previous electronic discovery articles, I discussed the Subpoena/CID, the Legal Hold, the Identification of Custodians, and the Collection. One very important component of the collection of electronic discovery is preservation of the chain of custody. If the collection process is being handled by forensic professionals, they have very strict procedures for maintaing
Gone are the days where we need to print a PDF document, handwrite our signature on the paper version, scan the paper into a PDF file, and then email the PDF file. We can use Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat to electronically sign the PDF document and save a signed
Imagine the associate attorney sitting in front of their computer staring at a database containing tens of thousands of documents. It is the beginning of the litigation matter and no one on the legal team has a good sense of what is in the document collection yet. At some point,
In electronic discovery matters, we tend to collect a lot of Excel files from our clients. This fast tip is an interesting Excel macro that generates a report of all of the worksheets within all of the Excel files in a folder. Download Sample Files
During a litigation matter, there is often a need to produce documents in PDF format. This fast tip demonstrates how to endorse PDF files for production. Download Sample Files
All roles within a legal team have had the need to compare two lists of bates numbers. This fast tip will share one easy way to do that using Excel. Download Sample Files
Another topic when training a litigation support newbie is the concept of how we go about getting searchable documents for our document databases. One of the most important reasons why we provide litigators with document databases is to enable the legal team to perform searches across all of the documents
We create a lot of screenshots in litigation support. We use a number of different software tools to create the screenshots. My favorite is Snagit. This fast tip demonstrates one of my favorite Snagit features and I provide some examples of why I use it. For reference, you can read
This fast tip will demonstrate how to use DOS commands to create a file listing. In another Fast Tip Friday, I demonstrated how to get a list of all files in a folder using an Excel macro. Download Sample Files
When training a newbie in litigation support, I always explain to them the concept of control numbers versus bates numbers. In order to create a litigation document database, we need every record (document) in the database to have a unique identifier field. The criteria for the contents of this field
This fast tip will demonstrate how to use the Bulk Rename Utility software with a text file that will instruct the software how to rename the files. To learn more about the concatenate function used in this tutorial, see my article entitled Concatenate – Fancy Word, Simple Meaning. Download Sample Files
Concatenate is one of many fancy words we learn while working in litigation support. It is a technical term and it is a verb defined as “to link (things) together in a chain or series.” Most of the time we are using concatenation to piece together multiple values. We also have
