Once you have completed the review and categorization of your documents, you will be ready to create a production.
On the New Production page, in the Other options section, you will be able to choose deduplication level, volume labels and breaks, and how your documents will be sorted within your production. While some options, such as producing natively with slipsheets, will impact the overall page count of your production, it is the production deduplication level that will impact the number of documents that are produced.
DISCO offers three levels of deduplication:
- Global deduplication by family – (default) Produces each duplicated family in the production one time.
- Custodian-level deduplication by family – Produces a separate copy for each custodian associated with a duplicate family.
- Full reduplication – Produces documents as they were ingested into DISCO, prior to deduplication.
To further understand how production deduplication levels work, we will walk through an example scenario. You are working on a case in which you collect the mailboxes of four custodians (Ann, Bob, Charles, and Danielle) from your client’s email server. In addition to the emails found on the server, Charles has a local copy of his email, which is also collected. All five mailboxes are ingested into DISCO and globally deduplicated so that your team only reviews one record of each document.
NOTE: For more information on how deduplication works within DISCO in general, see Deduplication within DISCO.
It is important to note that when families are processed by DISCO, each family member (or document) becomes its own individual record in DISCO. In this example, the email and each attachment will result in a total of three unique records. This allows you the flexibility to produce, slipsheet, or withhold any family individual family member as needed.
Now, during your review you find that each of the four custodians is a recipient to an email that has two attachments. Again, while this email was contained in each of the mailboxes collected and therefore ingested five times, your team will only review it once. Let’s say you have decided to produce the email and both attachments. Here are the production results based on deduplication level:
- Global deduplication by family – DISCO will produce the email and two attachments, for a total of three documents (exactly how it is displayed for review).
- Custodian-level deduplication by family – DISCO will produce each family four times, once for each custodian, for a total of twelve documents.
- Full reduplication – DISCO will produce each family five times, replicating what was ingested, for a total of fifteen documents.
Regardless of how many instances of a document you decide to produce, the deduplication level will apply only to the documents and instances identified to be part of this production. This means that if the production is defined by an instance level search, the production deduplication and resulting metadata will be limited to those instances. If the production is defined by a document level search, all metadata associated with all instances of that document will be considered for production.
If you intend to produce metadata from all of the instances of the documents, and are uncertain if your search will potentially limit the metadata to the information from a smaller number of the instances, then a best practice is to create a tag or folder for the documents intended for production. This is because tags and folders are on the document level, rather than the instance level. The production documents can then be based on that tag or on a search for the folder. Please see Documents vs. instances for more information related to document and instance level searching.
When creating a custom load file, you can choose to include other fields of instance metadata from the available fields in DISCO productions.
To create a custom load file, use the options in the Metadata load file section. Here you will be able to view all of the fields that are included in DISCO's standard load file, rearrange the order of the fields and add custom fields.
To rearrange any of the fields, click on the card and drag it higher or lower in the list to the new position. To remove fields from your production load file, move your mouse over the right side of the card for a field, and click the 'X' to remove it. You can also add custom fields using the section on the right.
