Changelog

Email attachments are the most challenging document format to review in large and complex disclosures. Large exports typically contain emails with dozens of attachments ranging from spreadsheets to images to even .PST exports of other emails.

Attachments are best reviewed in the context of the email they were sent with, but simultaneously they also need to be considered with respect to the entire document bundle — we've seen instances of the same exact file attached to more than 50 different emails in a single disclosure request.

Historically, in Phaselaw we've chosen to bundle attachments in with the emails they were sent with, so that they can be reviewed in context.

Today, we're excited to announce that we've gone several steps further. When you import data into the product, Phaselaw now automatically pulls each attachment out and loads that into your Documents tab. When you view an email, you'll now be able to see which documents were attached, and similarly when you view a document you'll be able to see which emails contained that document as an attachment. This has a number of substantial benefits:

• Deduplication: Attachments are now deduplicated across emails, so you'll never have to review the same attached document multiple times or catch a duplicate yourself.
• Independent scoping decisions: It's now much easier to make independent decisions about whether an email and its attachments are in or out of scope for a request. Rather than having to out-of-scope pages, you can easily, for example, mark an email as out of scope but leave an attachment in scope.
• Smaller documents, faster reviews: Each attachment is broken into a separate document, so you'll no longer have to deal with dozens of pages when confronting an email with a large number of attachments.

This feature is now live for all customers and any new case loaded into the product will have its attachments broken out.

We've recorded a short video going over this new functionality in full, which you can view above.