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ediscoveryMy goal in writing these articles is to help people in the legal profession work more efficiently with technology. A recurring theme is how people can use software that they already have in creative ways to do their legal jobs more efficiently. That’s why I talk a lot about Microsoft Office products – because most of us already have Office on our computers and just don’t know how to use it to its full potential.

A few months ago, I wrote about a program called SharePoint and how it is underutilized in the legal profession. Now, I’m going to take that idea one step further and show you how it is underutilized if you are not using it as a $5-a-month document review platform. SharePoint integrates with OneDrive online, so if you have an Office 365 account, you get 1 tb of online storage for your case files through OneDrive — but keep in mind that SharePoint Online has a file limit of 5,000 items, so you can use it only on your medium-small cases.

SharePoint allows you to share your document library with others on your coding team and sync your data directly to your hard drive for fast, easy access. Using large doc review platforms, it can be time consuming to download your data after you have coded it. With SharePoint, you can keep local copies of the data on your hard drive as well as on the cloud for instant access.

How To Set Up Your Data For Document Review

Data in SharePoint is set up as libraries. Create a new library for your case. Here, for demonstration purposes, I will be using my online library with various pdfs I have in one of my non-client-related SharePoint libraries. Now you can either drag files directly to your library, or sync that library to your computer and move files to the synced folder like you would with Dropbox to get the files to the cloud.

Now that your files are in the cloud, you need to start thinking about how you want to organize them. Do this by creating columns of metadata. You can create columns that contain text, a drop-down list, a check box, or a yes/no box, among others. You can also choose to create a star-rating system, like what I showed you with Adobe Bridge. Here, I have created columns for Description, Case Issues, and Ratings. You could also create a drop-down list for document type (e-mail, picture file, presentation, etc.), or witness names, or whatever else your case calls for.

data

Now you edit your data. Libraries have two modes, View and Quick Edit. Select Quick Edit and your library of data becomes more like an Excel spreadsheet where you can enter values into each cell. Read More