At Issue Technology Corner

Many Summation users are unaware of Summation’s document attachment viewing options. However, the attachment viewing feature is a great way to increase the value of a traditional database and is essential when reviewing e-evidence. The attachment viewing features allow users to easily view related or attached documents that are not displayed in the current record set. The features also allows users to add all related documents to search result sets. Finally, users can use these features to keep track of what documents were sent together, or emailed, with other documents. Here’s how it works.
The attachment viewer tracks the parent and attachment relationships between documents. The parent document is the first document, or lead document, in a group of attached documents. For example, the fax cover sheet sending documents is the parent document. Or, the cover letter enclosing important or relevant information is the parent document. All other documents in the group of attached documents are the attachments or child documents.
For the attachment viewing system to work, all documents in an attachment group need to be coded as individual documents. A fax cover sheet would have its own database record. Each document attached to the fax cover sheet would have its own record. Similarly, a cover letter has its own database record, and each document attached would have its own record. I think you get the idea.
Coding the relationship between parent and child/attached documents is key. Every parent document record includes the docids of all attached documents in the attchids field. Every attached document record includes the docid for the parent document in the parentid field. Let’s take an example of a fax cover sheet sending a letter and a table of data. The group of documents has an entire bates range of ABC00001 – ABC00009, as follows:

• Fax Cover Sheet: ABC00001
• Letter: ABC00002 – ABC00008
• Table: ABC00009

First, create the record for the Fax Cover Sheet. The Bates Range is ABC00001. Now, because the document has documents attached to it, you need to code the Attchids field (e-table). The DOCIDS, or beginning bates number, of each attached document gets coded here. So, you’d type in ABC00002, ABC00009 in the Attchids field. Now, w’ere ready to code the document attachments. The Bates Range for the letter is ABC00002 – ABC00008. Because this is an attachment, you also need to code the parentid field. Type in ABC00001 in that field. We’re going to do the same thing for the table. It’s Batesrange is ABC00009, and ABC00001 goes in the parentid field.
Fortunately, imaging vendors usually capture this information and can provide it to you with their load files. E-discovery vendors also capture this information and can provide it to you in the eDII files. Thus, if you think about this ahead of time, you will not need to code in this information.
Now, that all the attachment information is coded, you can put it to work! It works easiest, in my opinion, from Column Display. If a record is included in an attachment group as a parent document or an attachment, you can view all related documents by right mouse-clicking on the record’s row number in Column Display, and selecting “View Parent Doc & Attachments” or “View attached documents,” depending on the cirumstances. The attachment viewer will launch, and you will be able to select to view the image, OCR text, or data for the attached documents, even if the attached documents were not included in your current record set in Column Display.
That’s not all it will do. If you perform a search, you can add all related documents to the search result set to make sure you’ve captured the entirety of document attachment groups. Again, from Column Display, go to Search|Include Family Summaries. Summation will add any attached or parent documents to the record that are associated with the documents currently displayed. Those added records will be highlighted for easy reference.

If you go to the sample case, P Franc v. Morris (Version 2.5), you can play around a little bit with these functions in the email collection (bates prefix eml). I think it is a very useful tool that not enough users know about. It can save you a lot of time because we all know every time we see a fax cover sheet or letter, we want to know what was attached!

Lisa Ratzlaff

Although Summation’s E-Table has been around now for years, I notice that many users are still defaulting to, and creating new databases in the Standard Table and the old trusty and familiar Standard Form. While I understand this form is what we’re used to and models itself after the old paradigms we developed in a paper-litigation world, there are several reasons to switch over to the E-table. I’m going to post a series of articles to explain why I think using the E-Table is what makes sense, including a basic description of tables and forms, features of the new E-Table and its forms, reasons to use the E-Table and its forms, and tips for helping you make the switch, including dealing with imaging vendors to provide you with appropriate load files for the E-Table. While change is not always easy, change can be good. Now that I’m used to the new E-Table and the E-Stdfrm and the flexibility they provide, I will never switch back.