About documents
The Documents page is your team's document home. Everything the team has uploaded or generated appears there, in a table you can filter, sort, and arrange to suit the work in front of you. Start with what a document actually is — it is more than a single file.
Documents carry versions
A document is a container, not a single file. Upload a new version and it joins the versions already there: the document keeps its identity, its title, its tags, and its place in your collections. The Versions column goes up by one. An older Word or Excel file (.doc, .xls, .dot) is converted to the current format on upload, and a Word template (.dotx) is saved as a Word document; either way the converted file becomes the latest version with the original kept as the first — see Upload documents. A discussion can add a version too: ask its agent to edit a Word document and save the draft, and the edited file, tracked changes included, becomes the latest version — see Use discussions. That is what lets a document accumulate drafts and counterparty mark-ups over the life of a matter without becoming a scatter of near-identical entries.
What happens after you upload
Uploading a file does not finish the job on its own. The file is stored, and processing then runs in the background. You can carry on working, or close the page, while it does. You will be notified when initial document processing is complete.
A document becomes usable in stages rather than all at once. Its text is extracted first, then indexed so it can be searched and used elsewhere in the app. Word documents are additionally broken down into their clause structure. Each stage is tracked separately, so anything that needs only the text can start as soon as the text is there.
The Status column shows the current status of all processing on a particular document. Hover over it for details. If a step has failed, the details say why, and the notification you receive says the same.
Processing makes a document usable on its own. To have AI work out what a set of documents means together, see About contextualisation.
Organise your documents
There are two key, complementary, ways to organise your documents:
- Collections group documents into folders. When your team has collections, rows group under collapsible folder headers, and you can drag a document from one folder to another. Documents in no collection sit ungrouped.
- Tags are labels applied across documents, independent of collections. They come from a vocabulary the whole team shares, so everyone tags the same things the same way. Tags are an optional feature each person turns on in Settings.
See Manage collections and Manage tags.
Document actions live in the action bar
You do not create documents from the table itself. The action bar that runs across the top of the app carries the New document action — upload files, create a document from a template, or write a text document — so it is available wherever you are. (Your team's templates themselves are managed on the Workflows page's Templates tab; see Templates.)
Actions specific to the Documents page sit in the toolbar at the top of that page instead: the Document navigator — a view of how your documents relate to one another (see Explore documents with the navigator) — and Collections and Tags, which open the managers of the team's collections and tags (see Manage collections and Manage tags).
You can have more than one documents table
The page starts with a single table called Documents. You can add more, and each keeps its own columns, filters, and sort. One table for the matter you are working on, another for the team's precedents, a third for what you are reviewing this week — each remembers how you left it.
The tables are yours. Changing the columns on one does not change what anyone else sees. See Manage document tables.