How SharePoint Is An Underutilized E-Discovery Tool: A Pictorial Walkthrough

According to tech columnist Jeff Bennion, Sharepoint is a handy tool for smaller cases where you need advanced sorting tools but don't want to pay a fortune in fees.

My goal in writing these articles is to help people in the legal profession work more efficiently with technology. A recurring theme is how people can use software that they already have in creative ways to do their legal jobs more efficiently. That’s why I talk a lot about Microsoft Office products – because most of us already have Office on our computers and just don’t know how to use it to its full potential.

A few months ago, I wrote about a program called SharePoint and how it is underutilized in the legal profession. Now, I’m going to take that idea one step further and show you how it is underutilized if you are not using it as a $5-a-month document review platform. SharePoint integrates with OneDrive online, so if you have an Office 365 account, you get 1 tb of online storage for your case files through OneDrive — but keep in mind that SharePoint Online has a file limit of 5,000 items, so you can use it only on your medium-small cases.

SharePoint allows you to share your document library with others on your coding team and sync your data directly to your hard drive for fast, easy access. Using large doc review platforms, it can be time consuming to download your data after you have coded it. With SharePoint, you can keep local copies of the data on your hard drive as well as on the cloud for instant access.

How To Set Up Your Data For Document Review

Data in SharePoint is set up as libraries. Create a new library for your case. Here, for demonstration purposes, I will be using my online library with various pdfs I have in one of my non-client-related SharePoint libraries. Now you can either drag files directly to your library, or sync that library to your computer and move files to the synced folder like you would with Dropbox to get the files to the cloud.

Now that your files are in the cloud, you need to start thinking about how you want to organize them. Do this by creating columns of metadata. You can create columns that contain text, a drop-down list, a check box, or a yes/no box, among others. You can also choose to create a star-rating system, like what I showed you with Adobe Bridge. Here, I have created columns for Description, Case Issues, and Ratings. You could also create a drop-down list for document type (e-mail, picture file, presentation, etc.), or witness names, or whatever else your case calls for.

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Now you edit your data. Libraries have two modes, View and Quick Edit. Select Quick Edit and your library of data becomes more like an Excel spreadsheet where you can enter values into each cell.

Once your columns are set up and you are in edit mode, enter the data for each document.

You can sort and filter it by clicking on each column header.

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Here is a filtered set of results showing just the documents tagged as having the issue “damages”:

You can also run text searches of your OCR’ed documents. Here, I did a search for the phrase “mindless one” in my library. The search function searches titles and document content. Here, you can see that my search phrase returned results that do not have that phrase in the title, meaning these results came up because that phrase is in the actual content of the document.

You can set a filter on your documents to show every document where the Rating column is empty. That way, if you code the rating column for every document that you come across, filtering out the documents to show only the documents with an empty rating, you can quickly filter out the documents you have already coded, leaving just the ones left to review.

Things To Keep In Mind

In edit mode, you cannot view the documents. There is no way (yet) to have a viewer window while you are coding. The way I do it is to sync the files to my desktop and view them in Windows explorer in a separate window, but code them online in the browser.

SharePoint is certainly not the best doc review platform, but it’s a handy tool for smaller cases where you need advanced sorting tools but don’t want to pay thousands a month in license and hosting fees.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by e-mail at jeff@trial.technology.

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