For complete search documentation, please see the DISCO search manual.
Searching in DISCO is similar to other database tools you may have used in the past, such as Westlaw or Lexis Nexis. Like these legal research databases, DISCO uses Boolean search operators. We recommend you use this guide as a resource to reference these operators as well as the different search terms syntax available for use to filter or expand your search results. In particular, this guide provides three ways to quickly improve your DISCO searches and some commonly used search terms.
Key word search
By default, DISCO treats any word you put into the search bar as a keyword search term. Search terms can be of words or phrases (when enclosed by quotation marks) located in the body of a document, or within a specific field of information a document possesses, such as its metadata, work product (such as an applied tag or redactions) or other attributed characteristics.
It is important to note that search queries that do not specify a field in the search syntax automatically search a few more fields, depending on the creation date of the matter. Fieldless keyword search is intended to search the text of the original document, and does not search all of the metadata fields. For new matters created after June 16, 2025, the search includes only the document text, subject lines, and authors. For matters created on or before June 16, 2025, fieldless search also includes the document note, custodians, and user defined fields. DISCO reduced the scope of search for new matters because of feedback from customers that it was including too many irrelevant documents. We did not make this change to older matters because it could disrupt existing search results and counts.
Boolean operators
DISCO allows the use of Boolean operators to create more complex search strings. The easiest way to conceptualize how Boolean operators expand and contract your search results is to think of them as a Venn diagram where the search terms are the circles, and the areas where the circles overlap represent the documents that have a common search term (using the “AND” or “&” Boolean operator), the areas where the circles do not overlap represent the documents that do not share the specified term (the “NOT” or “%” Boolean operator), and the complete areas of all search term circles combined represent the documents with any one or more of the search terms (the “OR” Boolean operator, or its implied equivalent, a space between the search terms).
Folders
Clicking the folder icon lets you navigate documents within your folder structure. Clicking a folder name adds a filter to your search criteria, showing you by default that folder's contents as well as any contents of subfolders within. You can turn off the option to include subfolders by changing the Include documents in subfolders toggle to an X. This will only show the contents of a particular folder and not its subfolders. Documents can be added or removed from folders using the folder icon on any search query (or selection inside the query).
Commonly used search terms
With this conceptual understanding of how search works in DISCO, here are some common search terms available for use in DISCO when looking for documents:
| Search term | Example search | Description |
| Tag | tag("Hot") | Find all documents tagged Hot |
| Responsive Tag | tag("Responsive") | Find all documents tagged Responsive |
| Email Participant | participant("sample@csdisco.com") | Find all emails with sample@csdisco.com as a participant in the from, to, cc, or bcc fields |
| DISCO ID | id(1234) | Find document with the randomly assigned DISCO ID 1234 |
| Ingest Session ID | IngestSessionId("IngestSessions/1") | Find all documents ingested during ingest session 1 |
| Custodian | custodian("Andy Zipper") | Find all documents ingested from custodian Andy Zipper |
| Document Type | type(word) | Find all Word documents |
| Date | date(after 11/01/2020) | Find all documents with a sent date (email) or a last modified date (non-emails) after 11/01/2020 |
| Bates number | batesnumber(Enron000367) | Find document with the Bates number Enron000367 |
| Email Subject | subject("Re: contract") | Find all emails with the subject Re contract pending. Note: When searching documents, the colon punctuation is not necessary. |
Search Hits and PDF vs. Text views of the Document
When viewing individual documents from a search result, the number of search terms found in the document is shown as Search Hits in the upper right corner of the window. You can navigate across the document from one term hit to another.
It is possible that the search hits # in the PDF view may be different than the Text view, if the Text view was ingested from a different source than the PDF view. For example, if the Text view included the text of work product content added to the document, while the PDF view source did not include that work product as text, the Text view may have more search hits.
For a training video about DISCO's search and review features, see DISCO 101: Search & Review.