Full End-to-End Case Workflow | Webinar Recording

Recording

Summary

In this session, Duncan Fraser from Noticia delivered a practitioner-focused end-to-end walkthrough of a complete eDiscovery matter in Nuix Discover. The session covered the full continuum from document ingestion through processing, review, culling, quality control, and production — with practical guidance on both solo and team-based workflows.

Attendees saw a live demonstration of how to load documents, validate ingestion results, clean up a review set, navigate and code documents efficiently, use analytics for QC, and export a production with redactions applied and a load file attached.

Key Areas Covered

Order of Operations and Pre-Processing Risks:

• Before any documents are loaded, scoping and planning — including date ranges, custodians, issues, and keyword strategy — should be documented. These decisions recycle downstream and save significant review time.

• Legal holds must be issued early. Teams chat data is often only retained 93 days by Microsoft by default. Advising clients to preserve information before collection is a core professional obligation.

• The two biggest project risks are poor collection (clients exporting data in ways that strip metadata) and poor review preparation (not knowing scope, keywords, or issues before review begins).

Case Setup and File Repository:

• Create the case structure — browse pane fields, column templates, review and privilege coding templates — before documents are loaded. Add a single test document early so templates display correctly during configuration.

• Documents are uploaded to the File Repository (the Nuix internal drive) before ingestion is triggered. Nuix requires files to be zipped before upload to preserve metadata and speed up transfer.

• The file repository enforces a two-folder structure: the first folder becomes the Collection ID, the second becomes the Custodian — both are tagged to every document in that ingestion batch.

Ingestion Settings and Validation:

• Key ingestion settings include deduplication level (case vs. custodian), date range filters, file type exclusions, NIST file exclusion, language identification, PII detection, and whether indexing runs during or after ingestion.

• For email format, choose between EML/MSG with attachments (editable, forwardable outside Nuix) and MHT (web-viewable, no embedded attachments). Note: discovery plans are increasingly specifying no MHT email.

• Always review the ingestion report before proceeding to review. The report shows document counts, suppressed files, duplicates, excluded extensions, and any errors — validate these against what the client delivered.

Culling and Pre-Review Cleanup:

• Before opening a single document for content review, cull aggressively: bulk-code audio/video and unrecognized file types as not relevant, apply date range filters using Top Family Date, remove family duplicates, and run email thread analysis to isolate pivot emails and attachments only.

• Filter by custodian, sender domain, or document source to remove out-of-scope material in bulk. A set of 4,000 documents can realistically be reduced to 1,200 or fewer before any substantive review begins.

Document Review Strategy:

• Never start at the top and work to the bottom sequentially. Sort by title, date, or type to find patterns and batch-code similar documents. Use search term families to surface documents containing known key terms and prioritize those first.

• Use Find Similar (next to the email icon in the viewer) to locate documents that are conceptually similar to a key document — useful for surfacing related records without running a new search. Use inline text filtering and keyword search to follow leads as they emerge during review.

Quality Control with Analytics:

• Use the Document Map in the Analytics dashboard to identify inconsistent coding. Documents clustered together by conceptual similarity should generally share the same relevance or privilege code — outliers are visible at a glance and can be corrected immediately.

• Before production, always run a check for documents coded both relevant and privileged. Use a binder for your production set and search within it for any document with a privilege highlight applied — review and correct before exporting.

Production and Export:

• Export via a custom export job as an endorsable image (PDF) with text files included. Stamp documents with a Doc ID in the header or footer. Apply privilege redactions on the export — specify the redaction colour and label at this step.

• Include a load file (hyperlinked Excel) as your Schedule A equivalent. Note that exported documents retain the folder structure from ingestion — files will be nested under custodian and collection folders, which can be easily flattened before delivery.

Follow-Up Notes from the Session

A dedicated session on ingestions and productions in more depth is planned for an upcoming lunch. Excel spreadsheet redactions will also be covered in a separate session. A French-language version of this end-to-end walkthrough has already been recorded and is available on request.