How to Find Files You've Mistakenly Forgotten to Tag: GoldFynch's New eDiscovery 'Tag Propagation'

01 March 2018 by Anith Mathai eDiscovery organization tags attachments extracting-files

GoldFynch lets you tag related eDiscovery files so you can review and produce them easily. But what if you miss tagging some by mistake? Specifically: email attachments and ZIP files. Now, GoldFynch spots these misses with its ‘tag propagation’ feature. Here’s how it works…

Tags make it easy to review and produce your eDiscovery files

Think of a tag as a stamp or a sticky note on a file. You can tag individual documents or groups of files, making them easier to find. When you search for a tag, all those related files get pulled up. You can name your tags whatever you want, and there’s no limit to then number of tags you can create. Best of all, tags don’t affect files in any other way. GoldFynch deals with them like it would all other files.

But emails and ZIP files can complicate the tagging process

Emails often have attachments that get overlooked in eDiscovery. It’s easy to read the text in an email but to forget that there’s a crucial attachment too. GoldFynch helps solve the problem by automatically extracting email attachments and zip files. And it makes them ‘searchable.’ Which means they’ll show up when you’re doing keyword searches.

The only problem is, it’s easy to tag some of the attachments but overlook others. Even though the have related content and would probably need the same tag.

Luckily, GoldFynch can help with this. And the process is called ‘tag propagation.’

When extracting files, GoldFynch categorizes them as either a ‘parent’ file or a ‘child’ file.

  • Parent file: The email or ZIP file from which files are extracted.
  • Child file(s): The file(s) that get extracted.

And GoldFynch will alert you when files in the same family haven’t been given the same tag.

Let’s take an example and walk through the ‘tag propagation’ process.

Say you’re processing files to do with a new product a client is developing. You’ve tagged all the files as ‘confidential,’ and one of the files is an email titled ‘test.eml’. Now, suppose this email has attachments that haven’t been tagged ‘confidential.’ How does GoldFynch catch this and how can you fix the issue?

Here’s what you’d do:

Step 1: Click the ‘Tags’ tab in the GoldFynch main menu

That’s the menu you’ll see along the left side of your browser window.

Step 2: Click the ‘Check Family Tag Propagation’ button next to the ‘Confidential’ tag

Click on the Check Family Tag Propagation Button

GoldFynch will show you all the cases where parent and child files don’t have the same tag. And it’ll tell you where they’re stored - i.e., their directory path.

Here are the possible issues:

Child-to-parent issues: In the screenshot below, we can see an example of a child-to-parent issue. ‘Child’ file ‘file1.pdf’ was originally extracted from the ‘parent’ email ‘test.eml.’ But only ‘file1.pdf’ was given the tag ‘Confidential.’

Tagged child files with untagged parents

Parent-to-child issues: In contrast, the screenshot below shows us a parent-to-child issue. ‘Parent’ email ‘test.eml’ is tagged ‘Confidential’ but its ‘child’ attachments ‘file1.pdf’ and ‘file2.jpg’ are not.

Tagged parent files with untagged children

Step 3: Choose one of the ‘Fix’ buttons, depending on which files you want to tag.

  • To fix a single mismatch: Click the ‘Fix’ button next to that particular alert.
  • To fix all mismatches: Click ‘Fix all child to parent issues,’ ‘Fix all parent to child issues’, or ‘Fix all issues.’

Step 4: Choose the type of fix you want

For child-to-parent issues, you’ll be shown the window below.

Resolve child-to-parent tag propagation warnings

You have 2 options:

  1. Choose ‘Apply tag to all of parent’s attachments/children as well’: The parent file - as well as all files extracted from it - are tagged. If there are folders within the extracted file(s), all sub-files will also be tagged.
  2. Choose ‘Apply tag to just the parent item and leave all attachments/children untouched’: The tag is added to only the file that the child was extracted from, and not any other files in the family.

For parent-to-child issues, you’ll be shown the window below.

Fix parent-to-child tag propagation warnings

You have 2 options:

  1. Tick the ‘Also tag all of parent’s attachments/children as well’ option: GoldFynch will give all the extracted ‘child’ files the same tag.
  2. Don’t tick the ‘Also tag all of parent’s attachments/children as well,’ option: You’re choosing to tag only one/some of the ‘child’ files - not all of them.

Step 5: Click on the ‘Apply Fixes’ button

And you’re done! GoldFynch will fix the mismatches.

Want to learn more about eDiscovery for small law firms? Check out these articles.