In DISCO's document viewer, reviewers can visualize and navigate through a conversation thread, understanding who replied to what and when. Threading allows attorneys to review the entire conversation, identify missing portions, and make more informed decisions about their documents.
DISCO identifies inclusive emails within conversations. An inclusive email contains unique text content not found in any other email in the same thread. Attachments are not factored in. Identifying inclusive emails eliminates duplicate content in documents and saves review time.
Viewing conversations in the document viewer
When a document is part of an email conversation, DISCO displays related emails in the conversation browser, located in the right panel of the document viewer under Related Documents.
To navigate within an email thread, click Conversation. All parts of the conversation, including replies, forwards, and missing emails, are displayed. DISCO visually connects forward and reply messages in the email thread using lines to the left of the emails.
Hover over a particular email within a thread to display additional metadata, including Doc ID, email subject, sender, sent date, and recipients. A keyboard shortcut for navigating the conversation is also shown.
Tagging within conversations
DISCO allows users to add or remove tags to individual emails, attachments, and full conversations, and limit tagging to inclusive emails. To open the conversation tagging tool, click the tag icon at the top of the email conversation.
Use the checkboxes to the left of emails and attachments to select which documents you want to add or remove tags from. Quickly select a group of documents within the thread by clicking the dropdown arrow at the top of the thread.
Inclusive email identification
Inclusive emails contain unique content in the text of the email not found in other messages within the thread. Attachments are not considered in the analysis.
For example, if John and Tom have a back-and-forth email conversation in which they keep all prior messages within the body of their replies, the last email in the thread would be identified as inclusive because it is the only email containing the last piece of the conversation. If Tom forwarded an email in the middle of this thread to Sally, that forwarded email would also be inclusive because it contains forwarding information not found in John and Tom's messages.
Inclusive emails are indicated in the conversation display with a blue star to the left of the email information.
Viewing conversation data in search results
In addition to viewing conversations and inclusive emails within the document viewer, you can view conversation counts and conversation IDs in DISCO's custom columns.
Filtering by conversation status
Use the Document Relationships filter in the left sidebar to filter documents by conversation status. Expand Conversations to see options including "Part of a conversation" and "Not part of a conversation," along with conversation counts and dates.
Review stages
Conversations and inclusive emails can be used to configure review stages. When editing stage contents, two options are available under the document sources:
- Include all emails/chats in the same conversations to ensure that batches include complete conversations, even if some messages fall outside the source population.
- Limit conversations to the most inclusive content that retains only emails and email families with unique content, excluding any emails or email families fully subsumed by another.
These batching capabilities eliminate documents with duplicative content and ensure conversations are batched together.
Searching for inclusive emails
You can limit search results to show only documents identified as inclusive emails. Open search filters and select Inclusive emails only under DOCUMENT PROPERTIES to limit your search.
You can also use search syntax to narrow results:
IsInclusive(true)returns emails identified as inclusive within their conversation threadisDatabaseInclusive(yes)returns emails with unique content, filtering out emails that are duplicated within inclusive emails
Important: These search capabilities filter based on pre-computed inclusive identification across the database. They do NOT dynamically assess your current search to locate the most inclusive emails relative to only the documents in your results.
Conversation threading and inclusive identification from non-native emails
DISCO can create email conversation threads and identify inclusive emails from email images, even if no email natives or thread metadata are provided.
This means conversation threading and inclusive emails are available for:
- Collections of scanned or otherwise imaged emails, such as TIFF, JPG, or PDF, without natives such as PST, EML, or MSG
- Productions from opposing parties in which only images are produced and thread metadata is not included in the load file or is unreliable
When natives are provided, DISCO threads emails using header information in the native files and identifies inclusive emails by comparing the text of each, identifying those whose text is wholly included in other emails.