Overview

Whether you have a small case comprising a few hundred emails and PDFs or a case with 10s of thousands of documents and several large production sets to organize, MasterFile let's you keep on top of your evidence, whatever the format, easily.

There are several ways to load evidence.

  • You can drag and drop a document directly into a new document profile.
  • You can drag and drop files into the Watch Folder.
  • And you can use Express Load or the Email Loader to import tens of thousands of documents, emails and production sets (which may or may not come with a CSV or Concordance load file) quickly and easily.

This section covers Express Load and the Email Loader.

Express Load

Express Load makes short work of importing evidence, transcripts, e-discovery files, authorities and production, as well as work product, in fact any native file type, selectively or in bulk. Its simple to use controls let you manage all document ingestion yourself. You can process folders and subfolders or simply select specific files to load.

As each file is imported, its document profile is automatically created and a copy of the original file, plus any matching versions such as PDF or OCR text, attached. Express Load's three modes are designed to import small, medium and large batches of documents, with or without a load file, and vary the extent of metadata to complete at the import stage.

PDFs that are collections of tens or hundreds or more documents can be split into the actual individual documents which are then loaded automatically, too.

You can also use Express Load to load just meta data. This will let you very quickly catalogue and profile documents with certain information such as From/To, Issues, etc. without initially attaching the actual images or electronic files. You can therefore easily organize and explore evidence, facts, people, and issues to develop your case, the strategy and your arguments. Key documents and evidence can be imported and attached to profiles later.

Email Loader

MasterFile's e-Mail loader is designed to import native MSG/EML files, emails from Outlook, Outlook PSTs, Notes mail and webmail via IMAP into MasterFile. It creates a PDF file of each item being imported on-the-fly, preserving the native Notes or Outlook appearance of the original, and an RFC 2822 format EML file, which are saved alongside the native version.

Documents from IBM Notes databases other than mail (as part of disclosure or e-discovery request, for example) are also processed by the Email Loader.

To use the E-mail Loader, simply select the folder you want from the mail-box and the messages themselves. Values for document profile fields such as date, document type, author (from), recipient, CC, etc., are all obtained from the e-mail and filled automatically. For each e-mail loaded, a text file containing the message, along with meta data such as delivery information, is created and attached to the profile. In addition, the text is loaded into the "OCR/Transcript /Full Text of Document" section of the profile, from where you can create extracts, facts, etc. Files attached to the e-mail are extracted and attached to the "Attachments or related documents" document profile field.

By default the e-mail loader lets you select and load messages from a folder in your own e-mail box -- either Notes or Outlook depending on the option you set in [R+ Administration > User Settings].