Presenter: Scott Lefton, Sales Engineer, AccessData
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Transcript
Hey, I’m Nadine Weiskopf, and I am the Vice President of Product Management at AccessData. I am so pleased you could all join us today to get a sneak peak at FTK and Summation 6.0. As part of our renewed focus on improving the e-discovery offering and creating a tighter integration between forensics and e-discovery, we’re going to be rolling out this release very soon, with a lot of exciting new features to both Summation and FTK, which Scott is going to walk you through today. And with that, I’ll pass it to Scott.
Scott Lefton: Thank you very much, Nadine. Really appreciate that. Everybody can hear me I assume, and can see my screen now. My name is Scott Lefton, I am a Sales Engineer at AccessData. I have been here about five years, I’m a former Summation user, Summation trainer, I’ve worked at the law firm level, at the vendor level, and at the software level, and I’m a long Summation, iBlaze user, and lately I’ve been also dealing with some of our forensic product lines, and I’ve been supporting those products for a long time. So I’m really excited to have this opportunity to show you what’s coming out here in [indecipherable] and what’s on the roadmap.
The first thing I’d like to talk about, which is a big thing for us – I’ve been a preacher of this for a long time – it’s the ability to really integrate not just FTK information but our entire product line, and we are continuing to provide further enhancements and keep that integration as part of our offering. As you can see here on this slide, AccessData is the only provider to offer a truly integrated solution to help streamline the investigative and e-discovery process, offering seamless interoperability between FTK and Summation and really all of our products that we have out there.
And to me, I think that is such a big deal, because historically, there’s a disconnect between folks who… like our FTK users and our Summation users. Those have traditionally been very separate groups of people with separate tools, and I feel very passionate about that the process needs to be joined, that often, folks who were tasked with collecting data, are also downstream, can better offer more efficient processes for the folks who have to take that data into a court of law, whether that is a civil court or a criminal court.
So what we’ve done here on this slide is try to show exactly the type of interoperability that I’m talking about, just because I think a lot of people just don’t quite understand what this really means.
We have a unified SQL database that supports all of our products. That’s the same database schema. We also rely upon our tried and true FTK evidence processing engine, which is very robust, knows how to handle just hundreds and hundreds of file types, dirty data, it does it very, very quickly, we support distributed processing. But essentially all of our products use that same component.
Over here, on the right of the slide, you see the evidence. So what this diagram is trying to describe is that whether you’re an FTK user or a Summation user, you could be looking at the same unified database, looking at the same evidence, processing, using a single evidence processing engine. And then that data essentially just bubbles up into the interface – whichever interface, pick and choose whatever you want to use. If you’re a forensics user, you can use FTK, AD Lab, or Enterprise. If you’re more of a legal person, you could use Summation or eDiscovery. But the beauty is collaboration – bring these teams together.
So I think this creates for some really unique and exciting new workflows that are truly seamless, more efficient, the benefits are going to be saving time and money, and most importantly, reducing the risk for [indecipherable], if you ask me. That’s hands down the biggest reason I think this is important – the data stays in one place and it does not move. We’re not moving data from FTK into Summation, it’s simply a unified platform. And you pick and choose which set of goggles you want to look at that platform with.
So that’s what that diagram is really all about, and here on this slide you can see a handful of things that we’re specifically doing to keep that integration solid and enhance it. The following enhancements to the integration allow the users further benefit from the shared case database. We’ve done improvements to the indexing, so essentially creating a more foolproof index, whether you’ve got users in the Summation user interface – maybe they’re adding information to the index that will immediately be available to FTK users in the FTK interface. We have made the deduplication settings more consistent across the UI. And we also now share the same audit log.
Generally speaking, the improvements with integration are going to be just essentially workflow related. Right now, today, most folks might start off creating the case in FTK, and then just allow certain web reviews to come in via Summation. That’s typically our forensics AD Lab workflow. And that’s a workflow that you have to commit to when you’re using AD Lab in that fashion.
Our Summation users typically create cases in Summation and add evidence in Summation would then only do additional analysis in FTK. With 6.0, there’s going to be more freedom, to create your cases wherever you want to create them, there’ll be more freedom to figure out where you want to process, how you want to process, and again, we’re just again trying to enhance the integration between these two products. And it really deals with workflow, so there’ll be some improvements with workflow there.
Alright – with FTK 6.0, here are some of the key new features that we have coming out here for you in 6.0. Most notably is what we’re calling FTK Web Viewer. [Indecipherable] Summation – the benefit is we are actually going to bundle these things together. And it’s going to give FTK users the ability to simply check a box during the download of FTK if they would like to include the FTK Web Viewer. So it will be completely bundled together, and it brings really that power of the Summation toolset with the FTK toolset to make for a really more complete product.
So you can do things like conduct early case assessment earlier. You can allow attorneys, lay people instant access into the case database. And I look at this like: an FTK user has a specific job – get the data, process the data, recover the data. But once they recover that data, they have no clue what they’ve recovered. To decipher that is up to a lawyer, or prosecutor, to decipher, well, what are those files that this guy just uncovered. That’s that disconnect that I’m talking about. So the FTK Web Viewer I think brings people together, it will allow for better collaboration, but it will also just simply give the FTK user features that they didn’t have before, things like being able to create load files, and do web review, and see email threads, and see cluster analysis, and use our visualization tools. So it’s going to be a whole new experience for our tried and true FTK web… our FTK user base, if they want to use that Web Viewer.
Another key thing for a certain segment – maybe not everybody, but a certain segment of our user group I think is just going to love this next new feature. It’s called Multi-Case Search in Web Viewer. Sometimes, when cases have related data, folks want to do a global search, a global keyword search across all my cases, or maybe just select cases. So I’m really excited about that feature that we’re calling multi-case, or across case search, and we’re going to look at that in just a little bit.
Volume Shadow Copy is actually a feature that’s been in here for a while, but we’re really just highlighting it here today. We are very good at dealing with volume shadow copies within an FTK. You don’t need to rely on third-party tools. So we want to make sure everybody is aware of what we do for volume shadow copy that we quickly display differences, the differentials between volume shadow copies, and we make doing forensics on volume shadow copy really, really easy in FTK.
Another couple of things, one I’m really excited about too, is the internet artifacts. We’re making essentially some parsers, some data carvers, we’re building in some internet artifacts to help you find things like Facebook artifacts, Dropbox artifacts, just essentially a quick internet artifacts finder. We are continuing to enhance the types of artifacts that we can pull out of the data set.
For our mobile users, folks who do mobile investigations, we’re handling Cellebrite and XRY images today, we’re giving new compatibility for folks who are coming from Cellebrite or XRY and want to continue their workflow in FTK. We’re going to support those data file types.
Also, with 6.0 we’re coming out with a new agent certificate. It ensures the users can continue to integrate with third-party applications [for the agent] deployment. And then this is big too – lastly, Windows 10 support. Hard to believe that’s already here, and we’re seeing quite a bit of Windows 10 already. So we’ve got pretty much Windows 10 support all over our roadmap. With 6.0, it’s going to be compatibility for the client, you’ll eventually see Windows 10 agent support as well as installation support. But the client use for Windows 10 will be coming up.
Here’s a screenshot, just to show you, of cross-case searching in the web review. There is a tab here at the bottom, the very last tab here, and you can see on this system – we just had a couple of cases – but you can select which cases you want to search. Type in a search term and click ‘Search’. And then it’ll tell you the item hit counts. So I see I’ve got two hit counts for the word ‘confidential’ in that first case, and then 1080 in this one. And then we actually give you the results. So you can see, okay, there are the 1080, and if you click ‘Open in Review’, you can immediately go to that case and see those search results and perform a bulk tagging or bulk coding operation, or whatever you’d really like to do at that point.
You can also click select columns to pick and choose in this window what columns you want to see.
Now let’s talk about some of the key new enhancements for Summation 6.0. Multi-tenant environment – reduce e-discovery costs while ensuring data security. So we’ve got a few new features – self-managed account setup, Dropbox, which we’re calling LawDrop, and a sub-admin role. These are really geared for the ASP clients, folks who are hosting things in the cloud. One of the biggest problems that we see, that we hear about, that hosted service providers talk about, is really the manpower that it takes to move data in and out. And that when you’re in a hosted environment there’s a lot of effort that it takes to get client data up into the cloud, and then to get client data back out of the cloud.
So if you’re using a hosted solution, how do you do that today? Most common is FTP. So what we’re doing essentially that I’m really excited about is LawDrop. LawDrop is where the cloud meets the ground. As you, as a client, a reviewer, a user, of the Summation application, whether it’s in-house, whether it’s in an ASP or hosted environment, LawDrop gives you the ability to quickly upload and download files to the cloud without the need of a human being working on an FTP site or giving me credentials to an FTP site. It’s a secure file transfer protocol, directly built into the environment.
What makes this secure is the sub-admin role that we’ve also developed. What the sub-admin role does… and I’m really excited, because honestly, I don’t think anybody is doing anything like this. Sub-admin is a permission now that you can find which essentially, if you are an ASP, you can give your customers the sub-admin role, which is secure application access to do pretty much whatever they want, but only see what you want them to see. We have an issue right now today where users, if they have an application account can browse and see things that are on the server.
So essentially this provides really robust security for our hosted providers as well as the ability to put the power of the data load and the data pushing and pulling into their clients’ hands. So they’re not calling the project manager at Friday at nine o’clock at night, asking them, “Hey, can you upload this? Can you download this?” Essentially, they will have that secure capability to do that themselves, even though this is in the cloud, managed by a service provider.
So this is a screenshot of what LawDrop looks like. There’s a new tab here for LawDrop, and you will see essentially your cases. There is, in this system, two cases. We can look at this a little bit later too, but I just wanted to give you a little screenshot of it. There’s an Intake folder and there’s an Exports folder. The idea is literally drag-and-drop. You are a user of Summation, you have files on your desktop that you want to get quickly into Summation, you drag and drop them on to this space. They will immediately up… you can click the ‘Upload’ button or click ‘Upload All’, and they will upload essentially into the queue.
By clicking on the ‘Add Evidence’ button, you can go through the Add Evidence wizard and load these yourself. So it’s a direct… I like to think of it as where the cloud meets the ground. I can quickly, right from the ground, right from my own desktop, throw something up to the cloud and vice versa. If we have exports and production sets, those will be in the Exports folder. And I can quickly download those to my machine from the cloud.
There’s also what’s called a My DropSpace, which is going to be for the user themselves. So like I’m logged in as the administrator – that’s my dropspace. So I only see what is in my dropspace. And then shared with me is another folder where, if you want to share something that’s in your dropspace, you essentially can right-click and share the files if you want to pass that on to somebody else. So really exciting, neat, new features I think, for pushing and pulling data out of a host of platforms, called LawDrop.
Here is just a quick little screengrab of where the new sub-admin is located – it’s under Admin Roles, down here under Sub Administrator. You can designate somebody the rights to be a sub-admin. And what that does is essentially it limits to what they can browse to on the server. It’s a granular permission control designed specifically for hosted environments, if you ask me, where you don’t want users to be going anywhere that they shouldn’t be going. So you get to control exactly where they can look out on the Summation server, and control their file level permissions.
Another key thing to sub-admin is if you are sub-admin, when you’re doing export sets, if you’re familiar with export sets in Summation, that is the default location, is the Exports folder within the LawDrop. So that is… essentially the problem that we’ve solved there is today when a user does an export set, they can browse and they can put that export set wherever they want on the server. Again, that’s not good for a hosted environment. So this directs the export to go to a specifically safe, secure location that only the client can see. So that’s what really the sub-admin role is all about.
So there you can see again, just on this little slide too for Summation 6.0, for application service providers (ASPs), the multi-tenant platform with enhanced end-user administrative functionality gives your clients a cost-effective alternative to expensive private cloud solutions, with the benefit of on-demand, anytime access to manage their own discovery. Set it and forget it, couldn’t be any similar. I love this, that fact again – put the power in your client’s hand. And hopefully, maybe those project managers will get a vacation day or a day off, maybe some time in the future, by leveraging this technology and giving the power to the clients, and letting them run with it themselves. Set it and forget it.
Here’s some continued 6.0 feature enhancements. The number one thing here I get more excited by than any other else – it’s Browser Briefcase. This is unlike, I think, anything else out there. I am so excited about this. A few of our customers, especially up in Canada, were really pushing for this, because they just had specific requirements where they have some low-tech users. And some of those folks aren’t so sophisticated, technology-wise. So they needed a really easy way to distribute data. So we enhanced the legacy browser briefcase format… and if you ask me, I’m so excited about this.
We’ll actually do this in a little bit, but it is like the legacy Browser Briefcase, in the sense that there’s an HTML view that you can provide to the customer or to the recipient. But they can literally now… the problem with the legacy Browser Briefcase is you can’t see the files. You would have to click on the link and open them in its native application. With the new Browser Briefcase, we have included our viewer. So there is a quick way, without any software required – give somebody a Browser Briefcase and allow them to see the documents, search on the documents, and actually code the documents themselves.
And again, no software required. If you have an attorney who is a little technophobe and they’re not into technology, maybe they don’t have a sophisticated Summation or litigation support platform but you need to get the data to the, Browser Briefcase is awesome. That’s exactly what it’s designed for – quick and easy way to deliver documents, with no software required.
We also have some unitization enhancements – we have the ability to break up large documents by splitting or merging now, and large document handling by the Summation viewer. Again, this is something really unique that only we are doing. And it seems that large PDFs are on the rise – like huge PDF files seem to be very, very common, and the numbers of times we start to see large PDFs is… we’re just seeing them quite often now. So we’ve designed some capabilities in our Summation viewer to better handle large documents. And I’m talking documents that might have thousands and thousands of pages, might be gigabytes, hundreds of megs in size. And really, what we’ve done is a little trick where, relative to your cursor…
Most of the technology out there just does not know how to handle a document like that. You click on it, and it tries to load every page or load the whole file, and it will typically crash or it just will not be viewable. What we have done in our standard viewer is we only download basically five pages before and after where the user’s cursor is. So if you have a 10,000-page document, you’re actually not looking at all 10,000 pages, nor are we trying to cache 10,000 pages in the memory. We’re only doing what’s humanly viewable at that time relative to your cursor. So if you’re just scrolling through the document you’re okay, just next, next, next, even through 10,000 pages you will be okay. But it is still viewable, and I think that is honestly a really great feature too for our Summation user base, because large PDFs seem to be a pretty common thing.
Document groups – if you’re familiar with document groups in Summation – we have designed some enhancements to allow users to basically be more flexible with their document groups. Add documents to an existing document group or rename the document group. We also are supporting active directory integration, to basically better import your active directory users and provide single sign-on for your active directory accounts.
So here’s a screenshot – and I think when I get through my PowerPoint we’ll take a look at a few of these things – here’s a screenshot of the new interactive Browser Briefcase. Again, no software required. You give this… it’s a folder with files in it, and you tell the user to essentially right-click on the Summation Browser Briefcase executable… I have one here on my desktop, we can take a look at what the structure looks like. So here is the new Browser Briefcase, this is what the structure looks like. There’s the AD viewer, there’s the indexes, there’s the swfs, which basically show us… basically, swfs are what render in the viewer.
You can also open the filename, but essentially, you just right-click on this guy and run, and that’s what pops up. And in this case there’s really not a lot to look at, but whatever columns you have in your Browser Briefcase will be there. And then the user can click on a document to immediately see the document in the Browser Briefcase. Again, no software required. This is an open-source way to deliver your documents to… in my opinion, in instances when maybe you might not have a very savvy user, maybe it’s an expert witness or someone you just need to get the documents to, or it’s a lawyer who, again, doesn’t have any kind of sophisticated platform, but you need to deliver those documents, and you want to make it searchable. So by clicking ‘Search All Documents’, you can still search on the full text. And of what is in the grid.
You’ll see ‘View Native’, and if you view native you’ll see it in the viewer, you can also view the image, and you can also open it directly from the Browser Briefcase. If you run a search… like here I ran a search for the word ‘government’. I will see in the viewer all the hits for that in the Browser Briefcase. I think this is really neat.
And then one other feature is ‘Export Tagged’. So let’s say you deliver this to an expert witness, say, “Here’s all the expert spreadsheets, you’re doing forensic accounting for us,” and then they can manipulate it themselves. They also can tag the ones they want and export those files if they need to export those out. If they want to export those out, they can export directly from the Browser Briefcase.
So those are the new features. You’ll also notice the viewer is built in again, they can zoom. There’s zoom controls, page controls. And this is awesome, because again, no native software required. Let’s say you’ve got a hodge-podge of Word Perfect and Excel and email and AutoCAD. The user does not need those native applications to view these. They will render in the viewer.
So I’m really excited about that. It’s probably one of the things I get more excited about than anything else. So that’s a screenshot of the new Browser Briefcase, let’s go on through here.
Here’s, again, some additional 6.0 continued features, optical character recognition, we’ve expanded our OCR engine to deal with multi-languages. So when you’re in the user interface now and you click OCR, you can pick and choose which language you want to OCR. We are also increasing the speed, and making sure that if we had any… there were a few bugs, fixes that are also included in those OCR enhancements.
Credit card and phone numbers – if you’re familiar with the [NET] extraction capability – we are enhancing that, just to make sure that we’re more accurate with what we extract, making sure that we aren’t getting any false positives for credit card or phone numbers. We have job templates, scheduling job templates again to help users save time when they want to schedule jobs. Case Organizer unlike any other competitor – I could spend all of our time right from here on out just talking about Case Organizer, which I’ve been very much, actually, a part of those enhancements. It’s very near and dear to my heart.
But what we have essentially is the integrated fact and issue management, as well as we’ve integrated the Notes capability. The Notes tool has been fully integrated into Case Organizer, it’s easier to do Case Organizer reports. There’s just a lot… again, hopefully if we have some time at the end I can show you some of those things. But there’s a lot that’s been baked into the Case Organizer, which I think makes it much, much more useful and user-friendly than what we have right now.
We’re also exposing more columns in the item list. We have new options to allow you to determine if a document has been OCR’d, encrypted, created or modified, has embedded notes, hidden columns, rows, or worksheets, has tracked changes – tracked changes is huge, it seems like somebody asks me about tracked changes at least once a week, and we’re now exposing documents that have tracked changes in the item list, so if you want to see that. You also see columns for like when documents were last saved or printed, and when it was revised, how much time was spent on revising. So we are exposing much more metadata, especially around Office documents, now.
Sort order for email and attachments – we’ve always had this, but it was kind of tricky to really know how to sort parents and attachments due to our naming convention. So we just made it a lot easier on our users by just adding a quick family sort option, which keeps basically parents and children always together in the item list for easy sorting.
So here’s a screenshot of the new Case Organizer integration. If you’ve seen the panel in the existing user interface, you’ll notice that it looks very much the same, but we’ve done really a few key enhancements. Number one, we added the report button; and two, we integrated the Notes capability. It might not seem like, “Hey, Notes aren’t…” How much improvement can you do on the Notes tool, right? It might not seem like a huge improvement, but to me, I think this is a big deal. I feel like Notes is an everyday thing that most of our customers use, and I’m really excited about this enhancement.
So the idea is when you’re in the viewer, if you’re in a document, you click on ‘Create Note’ and you highlight the text that you want. A new window will pop up, asking you where you want that note to go. Do you want to create a new Case Organizer note or do you want to add it to an existing Case Organizer collection of notes. So here, I’ve got two notes on this document. Note one, it tells me the object ID of what I’m looking at, i.e. the exhibit number, and then the page to which this note comes from. If you scroll down, you will see all of the notes on this document. You can click ‘Report’ to generate a quick report of all the notes on this document or notes across all of your documents, however you want to do it. It’s really, really flexible.
You can also click the magnifying glass to have this immediately take you directly to the image to where that excerpt comes from. The Notes tool works on a document and transcripts, it works the exact same.
So if you ask me, I think these kinds of improvements will really make a difference to the everyday users, especially just doing things like simply taking notes. This view is also completely customizable, it’s a fully-functioning word processor. So if you want to add a chart or an image or some formatting like bullet points or numbers… it’s a fully-functioning word processor. You’ve got bold and indent and underline and formatting options and style options. So look at this like… In my law firm experience I saw so many users cutting and pasting things into Word that I would hope that this is going to save the time as well as just maintain the chain of custody and keep better track of where these things come from.
You can also create document links directly in the viewer in the Comments section. So if you want to link this as user is reading through all of your co-marketing contract case notes or whatever, witness deposition notes, as they’re reading through that they can quickly go to the document or click on a link and jump right to a particular document. And then when you are done and you want to put this in a report format, you simply now just click the ‘Report’ button. And this will create either an interactive PDF with all of your work product in it or a .docx file, again with all of your work product. What I mean by work product – I mean all of your comments, all of your details, all of your tags, all of your supplemental files, and all of the evidence that is linked to this Case Organizer object as well.
It’s like a fully self-contained package of work product. That is what this new Case Organizer is all about, and I’m just so excited that we’ve integrated our Notes capability into the Case Organizer as well. I think that’s going to be very, very helpful.
Another key thing – and again a problem that I think we have solved, or a piece really of innovation if you ask me – is dealing with how do we now organize and search on these notes? When you create a Case Organizer note, or really any object, you’ll see here on the left the object types now displace your actual case notes. So if you had facts or events or people, whatever Case Organizer objects you have in there will appear under this list of Object Types>Case Organizer. And by simply clicking on Notes and ‘Apply’, it will find those Case Organizer objects for you in the item list. And it syncs to the panel.
So as you go through the list of notes and you click on a note, you’ll see all of the context, all of the links, all of the details, tags, and so forth on that node. If you want to search for some content, maybe in your notes, like say… where are all my notes that talk about government compliance? You simply type ‘government compliance’ and go, and it brings you right to your notes that deal with government compliance, and then just click on the link or something to show where did that note come from within the context of the document.
So that’s how we can… now notes are a part of the item list, and you can filter, and you can search, and you can organize, and you can code your notes, just like any other object inside of your database. So that’s some of the key new improvements that we’ve done really to the note-taking.
So with the rest of our time here I’m going to actually fire up a beta version, and we’ll take a look at a couple of these features. So here we have our beta install. Let me go to the home page. Let’s first take a look at LawBox.
LawDrop – my bad. Looks like we haven’t updated the UI. So LawDrop now appears on the left tab, and here’s what it looks like. Here are your different cases. We can go ahead and click on an Intake folder, see what folders are inside of the Intake folder. If I right-click and say create new folder I can quickly create a new folder. If I click on this one here that I was playing with yesterday – and I uploaded some files – I can now see, here’s my volume one intake folder, and I’ve got my name next to it.
Let’s go ahead and see what I’ve got here. Maybe I’ve got some files that we can go ahead and just kind of show you what I’m talking about. So if I click a file out of Windows now… again, this is where the cloud meets the ground! This is in the cloud, but I’m on the ground. I just drag and drop that thing on to the window, and now that sends that up to the cloud. So now the files listed here, I can click ‘Upload All’ or just cherry pick the ones I want to upload, and then boom! Done! It’s been now loaded into the system.
Now, if I come over here and click this folder right here, I can decide to add evidence or create new… I’m sorry. It is right here. ‘Add evidence’, that little window right there. You select which one you want to do, you can do a folder or you can do a file, and click this button, and that will immediately just take you right to the Add Evidence wizard, so you can load those files or that particular file yourself. Again, the idea is really geared towards the ASP providers. Let your customer do their own loading at two in the morning. Don’t have them bother you. This is an easy-to-do process. They essentially just click ‘Native Files’, they choose their method, and it will already have essentially loaded this file up, and you just follow the wizard to kick off the processing.
So I’m going to go ahead and cancel out of this. We’ll go back to the LawDrop, and just show you two that… if there were any [productions and export sets] – unfortunately I don’t think there were in any of these cases – you would see those files there, and then you can also… vice versa, you can download them, from the cloud.
You can also upload files to your dropspace, which would only be viewable by you, your user, called My DropSpace. So then you can still move data in and out of the dropspace, and if you’d like to share it with somebody, you can click ‘Share’, and pick the user who you want to share this with. So we can go ahead and invite people who I want to share this with… I can see that I’ve already shared it with one member, [Agi Stephens], who’s a member of our development. But it’ll go ahead, and you can go see who else is there. If I wanted to share with Administrator… and this is just going to immediately start to look for folks in your system. Not a lot of users in this system, but…
Then it’ll tell you that this is shared with one member, and then when [Agi Stephens] logs in, he’s going to see that in his [Shared With Me] folder. So it’s a great way to share, collaborate, with objects in the LawDrop.
Alright, let’s take a look at cross-case search. Let’s do a cross-case search. Cross-case search is right here. It’s the last tab over. It’s certainly for our customers that I think maybe who deal with insurance, or maybe defense law, where they’re dealing with… maybe they’re handling a number of cases for the same clients, and they want to search across a group of cases for a specific keyword or something like that. The idea is we can go ahead and type in a keyword now – let’s do ‘test’ and click ‘Search’. So I’ve checked off two cases there, and I can kick off a search across two or more cases. It starts to give you a status, like submitted, completed, executed. So boom, that’s all done. And here, in AgiCase1 we have eight hits, and there are my eight hits, sorted by relevancy ranking.
I can pick and choose which columns I want, I can go ahead and click ‘Open Search in Review’ to look at those objects, if I wanted to look at those. I can also click like here… let’s go ahead and click on this one that had quite a bit more. This one had 1600 hits. There’s the 1600 hits in that particular case number two. And click ‘Open in Review’ if I wanted to go to there.
We can jump back too and see what else we had here in the PowerPoint that we wanted to kind of demonstrate here live. Oh, the Browser Briefcase. Let’s do that. I love the new Browser Briefcase.
So here on my desktop, I have a new sample of the Browser Briefcase. Let’s launch this guy. Alright, there it is. Opens up real quick, click on a document, there’s the document loading, there you go. We have now successfully… just basically give this folder to any user – again, no software required, you don’t need Summation to use this. They just need that folder. All of the prerequisites are essentially in that folder. And then they can go ahead and click on a particular document. Here I want to look at this one. And then what I really like about this is it lets the user add their own information.
So if I’m an expert and I want to type in my note or something like that, I can put in my own notes, and then go ahead and quickly do that. So I can see the documents. Again, in this example, there really wasn’t a ton of column data in there, but you can see that. And let’s go ahead and run a search here too – boom, do a search for the word ‘test’, and I can search on it. So I can quickly see this result! I just think this is huge! I mean, give your data to somebody, a non-sophisticated user, they should have no… they should come back with no excuse for why they can’t use this stuff. It’s fully searchable, editable, viewable, with no software required.
So there’s a live demonstration of the Browser Briefcase. They can also, like I said… if I wanted to take… okay, I’ve received these, I’ve found all my documents that have the word ‘test’ in it, I want to actually now export the tagged documents to a file folder, I can do that, just by clicking ‘Export Tagged’. They can also, in the viewer, click on and see where the hits are. So if you’re not familiar with our AD standard viewer… like we do some really great things for searching – we highlight the search term for you, we show you if it’s in the context of a multi-page document. Let’s say this is a 1,000-page PDF, and the hit is on page 737, you’ll see right about here there’s a little tick mark, and you can just jump directly to that hit within the context of the very large document. And again, our viewer is built in, so even if it’s large PDFs, you’re going to be able to see that hit on the page, even if it’s in a very large PDF.
So that is a live demo of the Browser Briefcase. Let me take a look here at what we also had on our agenda. I’ll show you some of the new Case Organizer tools, and then we’ll go ahead and open up the floor for any comments or questions I think. Not open up the floor, but I believe as our host was saying too, we can look at the chat and see what kind of questions have come in.
So let’s go ahead and take a look at this project here in review. So here’s what I’m talking about. Here’s the new Notes tool. So this is it, this is a live document. You can actually click in the Case Organizer too to expand and collapse these objects, like that. So I can actually expand and collapse them. So if I’ve got a lot of notes on the page I can expand them and collapse them. I can see there’s multiple notes in this wizard. I can also…
Like for example, let’s see if we can get this to work here. So see how I’m on page one of a four-page document? Well, this note’s on page three, so by actually just double-clicking on the magnifying glass down there, it will take me, as long as I’ve done this right… and again, this is beta, so sometimes they may have made changes recently that affect that. So the idea is that…
Oh, I’m clicking on the wrong one. Make sure I’m clicking on the right one. The idea is that this will take you directly in the viewer – at least it should – to where that hit is in the document. Oh, there it goes finally. So there it goes. Just took a little while.
So there you go. And also, you can… so here, just to demonstrate what the actual Notes tool looks like is… you click on the note there… so as you’re going through a document, if you want to create a note – and imagine this is a transcript or something like that, it works the same – you select the text, and then you say where you want this note to go. Do you want to use the existing note or do you want to create a new note? If we say use an existing note, I’ll come in here and say let’s add it to this one I’ve already got going. This one’s particularly called this… contracting notes.
And then click ‘OK’, and that is going to add it to the note there in the background, and that’ll go ahead and add that note, and then you can see that and it’ll be linked, and it’ll tell you where that note came from.
You’ll also notice that the note is no longer over here where it was… it was over here in five, six, three; we’ve moved it and fully integrated it with Case Organizer. So that’s what those Notes improvements are all about. I can see those notes there. And then click on a set of notes that you want to jump to.
So you want to go to the David Jones deposition notes – you click that, you would see all the notes there, and then you could click ‘Report’ when you’re done, to actually put that into a format like a PDF or Word document. So go ahead and click ‘Report’ and get that wizard up, that’s what this new report generation wizard looks like. And I’ve already done a report, if you want to look at it. But essentially, you can include the files themselves, so that’s like what’s linked into the document…
Like I said, I’ll go back to… [it was creating] a report of all of your own work product, all of your comments, the details about these notes, the… whatever kinds of objects you’ve got here, you can pick and choose, what are they that you want to include in the report, your notes, my notes, include the files, include a title page, a confidentiality statement, include an introduction. And then just click ‘OK’, and that’s going to generate the report. And I believe I have on my desktop here, somewhere, hopefully pretty viewable… I have my reports.
Here it is. So here’s what a new Browser Briefcase report looks like. Oh, actually, that’s not the one that I wanted. My bad. Let’s see…
Well, we could probably use that one. I apologize. I thought I had this one fired up and ready to go. Looks like I did not.
You’ll get the idea from this one. This is just one I did a while back. So there’s your cover page, and whatever information you have in the report will be in there, like the list of the documents, the list of actual… all of your comments from your notes. And then if you had any documents that were associated, those would actually be in there.
You know what? Let’s actually download it. Because I already did this yesterday. I want to make sure that we actually show you this. So on the home page here, under Reports, when you generate one of those new reports, it shows up under the Reports section under Case Organizer Reports. So unless Agi deleted it last night it should still be here, and it’ll be under this Case Organizer Reports. Yeah, there it is. This is the one I’m looking for. Click ‘Download’.
Because I think this is awesome too. The Browser Briefcase is a great way to deliver the actual discovery, and I think this is a great way to summarize your own work product, maybe share this with your clients. So here’s that report for… the co-marketing case notes report. There’s my cover page, it tells me the name of the case. You can give it a title, you can tell who authored it. And here are my notes!
It tells me information… I didn’t really fill out much about these notes, but… the name of the notes, status, impact… if I had tagged my notes, like what issues were tagged with these. It shows me the name of the object, I can click on that, and I can actually see here, or actually… these are the documents that were included, so that’s the source. So object ID 3, page 1. That’s right here. And there’s my actual excerpt from the note. And then what happens is we slip-sheet all of the documents that were included in the report.
So it actually gives me… here’s the first exhibit, and it tells me the name of the file. Here’s the next exhibit, and it tells me the name of the file. And then there’s the file. So I’ve just created an interactive PDF with all of my own work product and all of the evidence that supports my work product, my notes, and so forth.
And again, this just does it, kind of like in the situation of a document, but imagine that we were looking at a transcript – it would look very much the same way. You could excerpt transcript notes the same way, and really combine and link really all of your case elements, your case materials together, and bring it into a report if you had to do that.
So that’s what it looks like, and it couldn’t be any easier. We just built that reporting feature right into the panel. You just click on ‘Report’ when you’re looking at the Case Organizer panel to generate that report. And then as you check off evidence here, you can click ‘Add Evidence’ or ‘Remove Evidence’, so that’s how you use that panel.
So with that said, I think we’re going to… I think those are the key things that I wanted to show for you guys. I’ll say that Nadine or Jessica, if you guys have anything that you would like to add, feel free to do so. I know that you wanted me to mention that we’re going to be at ILTA. Not next week, but the week after, if I’m looking at my calendar right. And we’ll be at booth #200. And certainly I will be there actually myself, so I would be happy to give you guys a live demo or talk about any questions. You can also visit this link here, marketing.accessdata.com/6.0release for more information on 6.0, and where you can download a brochure.
Jessica, I don’t know if you’ve been monitoring the chat window at all. It’s been busy during the demo, but if there were any particular questions that you’d like to toss out there, I’d be happy to entertain some questions while we have some time left.
Jessica: Yes, okay, thank you, Scott. Yes, we have gotten a couple of questions, and the first one is an easy one we’ll start out with. When is the release date scheduled?
Scott: It’s currently slated for September. My guess is I would look to mid to the last half of September. Nadine may have a better drop date on that, but September is our goal, so next month, so pretty close, pretty soon.
Jessica: Right. Will the Browser Briefcase give the attorney the ability to review documents when they don’t have access to an internet connection, instead of having to print those documents?
Scott: Yes, yes! It will. As long as they have the folder, like I said – when you right-click and say ‘Create Browser Briefcase’, it creates a self-contained package into a folder, and then inside of there is essentially all of the prerequisites. There is no internet required, there is no software required, there is just a computer required. You know, a basic computer with basic prerequisites. The only prerequisite that I’m aware of is Adobe Flash, which I would say probably most everybody has on their machine already. But great question. There’s no software required, there is no internet access required. They just right-click and run, and it’s a self-contained little applet.
Jessica: Great. Somebody had asked: if I tag email items in Summation, are those tagged items also available or bookmarked within FTK for additional analysis or [PSTF].
Scott: If I could hug that person who asked that question I would.
[laughter]
Scott: If I could reach through the phone and give them a big hug, I would say, “Welcome to the family. Yes! Absolutely.” And vice versa – and vice versa! Because if you’re an FTK user, you find a smoking gun, you say, “Hey! I just recovered this deleted, encrypted document. It looks like something the lawyers might want to look at. They’re immediately going to see that, so long as they have permissions to see those files, and it depends on how the case is set up. But yeah, any notes.
So those columns… so if they’re doing issue coding, and issue tagging, and creating attorney notes in the column view, those columns are also viewable in the FTK UI immediately, immediately available and vice versa. [So hopefully that answers your question.]
Jessica: Yes. They passed on the hug though, so sorry.
[laughter]
Jessica: Okay. Somebody, another follow up on the Browser Briefcase had asked: does the user require administrator rights to run the Browser Briefcase?
Scott: No. I just did that because I have a habit of [IT], of running everything as an admin, because I am an admin, but no, they can just double-click on that executable. I guess the theory would be they would need… if this is a super locked-down machine where the user doesn’t even have the rights to run an executable, that could potentially block it. But no, it’s not a requirement to run as an admin. They just need to double-click on that, and essentially have Windows rights to run things.
Jessica: Okay. Somebody wanted to know too, are there any significant changes to the FTK 6.0 interface? [indecipherable] interface.
Scott: Yeah, so… I’m trying to think.
Not really. [laughs] Not that I’m aware of. I think what you’ll see is you’ll see more consistent deduplication settings, will probably be more consistent within FTK now, for like email deduplication. There will be some UI changes to make sure that the audit log is the same, but I think at first glance you’re not going to see really any difference.
Jessica: Okay. Somebody asked, Scott… they get a lot of discovery that’s in PDF form. They want to know if the tool is as effective if they don’t have a [mix] of native files, but primarily PDFs.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So if you get PDF files, what I tell folks who just get PDFs is to, if you can, make them searchable before you load them in actually. So like if you have Adobe Acrobat, even though… [you know, this is where] I kind of would give the same response to folks who are like, “Hey, we have paper. How do I deal with paper?”
Well, scan it to a searchable PDF, and if you load a searchable PDF through the Add Evidence wizard – which is right here, click on the plus sign and then just walk through Add Evidence – your life is going to be better. When you do a keyword search on the PDF, it will actually take you directly to where that keyword is in the viewer. Even though it started off as a paper document, by scanning it to PDF and then making it searchable before, prior – prior to loading it into Summation – your life will be good. It will be fully searchable, even though it started off as scanned piece of paper. So if you can do that, great.
Now, if you can’t… like maybe if you just don’t have Adobe Acrobat, and you don’t have any kind of technology at your scanner to OCR, you could always OCR after the fact, which is in our actions list here. Click ‘OCR Documents’, so that they do become searchable. But the whole reason why I say OCR them first is because that hit highlighting will not work this way. So what will happen is we just create a text file then. When you OCR, you create a text file, which is then viewable in the text viewer, not the image viewer. And my decade of litigation support experience, folks don’t want to see the hit in a text file, they want to see it on the actual… “Show me the page, where on the image did that hit occur?”
So that’s my advice, is ingest it as a searchable PDF, and even though it may be paper, it will still be a completely searchable… the hit highlighting will work in our natural viewer, and life will be good. All of the metadata will still be extracted in things like that. But I think we’ve got a good story to tell you for paper and PDF as well as native. Obviously we do a whole lot with native, but that’s my advice for PDFs.
Jessica: Okay.
Scott: [indecipherable]?
Jessica: Yeah. [indecipherable] another question. Somebody wanted to just confirm that this release of Summation 6.0 is the latest release after [5.36].
Scott: Yeah, [might want to] back me up, but that’s my understanding, is we’re going to go right from 5.6.3 to 6.0. There will be a jump.
Jessica: Great. We did get a couple other questions, but we’re running low on time here. We only have about two minutes left, and I do want to be able to pass it back to Shaun, our fellow sales… if we haven’t had a chance to address your questions live on the phone right now, I promise we will get these questions after the event, and either Scott or your AccessData representative will follow up with you via email to address those questions and any others that you might have. I did just want to remind everyone… Scott, can you flip back real quick to that website? So we have a landing page that we created to promote the 6.0 release that’s coming out in September, and we will also have new brochures available out there for download as well. And this video recording of today’s sessions will be made available from that page too, as soon as we get the recording and can get it uploaded on our YouTube site. We’ll make it available on that website as well. There is going to be a post-webinar survey, we’d really appreciate your feedback on how we did today and any other questions that you might have following today’s session. And with that, I will turn it back over to Shaun, our WebEx host, to wrap it up. Thank you, Scott and Nadine, for your help today.
Scott: Thanks to all the attendees for attending. I really appreciate your time. And for the questions as well. Thank you, everybody.
Shaun: Alright, ladies and gentlemen. That will conclude the webinar for today. You may now disconnect.
End of Transcript
