Advanced File Search​

When triaging a large number of documents for relevance, one of the highest impact actions you can take is a rules-based approach to excluding files. We now support the ability to use boolean and other logical operators when constructing search queries, which greatly increases your ability to exclude files in bulk. For example, in the context of an employee DSAR you may want to start by excluding all files that do not contain known variations of the employee's name.

Here's a quick guide to some of the new options you have for searching in advanced mode.

Advanced Search Usage​

We think this is super powerful update for triaging files in bulk and we're excited to get your feedback on it!

Additional Improvements​

Table Filters​

We've made a number of improvements to our table filters that make it easier to understand which filters are currently applied and ensure that you don't lose your table configuration when navigating between the table and individual documents.

• Filter design and experience is now consistent across all fields.
• Filters that are currently active now show in a different color and provide a preview of the active filter value.
• Filters are easier to remove by clicking the X button.
• Some less commonly used fields have been moved to a "More Filters" section, including the "Has Open Comments" filter and the "Show Duplcates" filter.
• The reviewer filter is now a multi-select field, allowing you to select multiple reviewers at once.
• Switching between the documents and emails tab will no longer reset the table filters.
• When navigating away and back to a table, you will land on the same page of results that you were previously on.

Improved File Deduplication​

We've upgraded our deduplication system to be smarter and more transparent. Deduplication is a powerful tool for speeding up document review. eDiscovery searches conducted in IT systems like Microsoft Purview often yield coarse, heavily duplicated results. This is particularly true for cases where multiple employee inboxes have been exported. Our deduplication system reduces this clutter and ensures that you only have to review a given file or email once.

You’ll now get clear indicators when a file is flagged as a duplicate, making it easier to understand what’s happening during processing. We'll also attempt to identify duplicates prior to upload, helping reduce storage use and avoid filling your case with unnecessary files.

Draft Exports (Beta)​

You can now export a draft version of your case to make redaction review easier and more collaborative. Draft exports display your redactions as red outlines, clearly showing what’s been marked without actually removing the underlying content. Comments are also included, so reviewers can see the context behind each redaction decision.

This new export option is available on our redesigned Export page, currently in beta.

The new export page will be the future home of all case exports. It keeps a history of every export you generate, making it easy to refer back to earlier work and keep track of who has generated exports. It also includes enhanced export options, allowing you to do partial case exports based on document status.

Additional Improvements​

• User selectors and dropdowns will now always display the logged-in user first.
• Made triage mode document transitions much smoother.
• Improved the performance and load time of redaction preview text in large documents.

Bug Fixes​

• Fixed an issue that caused the in-app chat button to obscure the edit button in the policy exemption detail view.
• Fixed an issue that caused the sender filter options in the email list view to not update when applying other filters to the table.
• When applying filters to a table, we now automatically reset the page to page 1 so you do not end up looking at an empty page.
• Area redactions are now displayed in page thumbnails in the page deletion experiment.
• Ligatures like tt and ae that appear in the Calibri font (used for rendering email headers) are now selectable.

New Experimental Feature: Page Deletion​

It is common for entire pages of a document to be out-of-scope / exempt, but drawing a black box over an entire page can give the wrong impression. We’ve heard from many customers that they often go back through our case exports and manually delete pages where the entire page has been redacted.

To make this process easier, we are introducing a new experimental feature that allows you to remove pages from a document directly in the product. We’re excited to get feedback on how this helps streamline your workflows and reduce the need for post-processing. You’ll be able to select and delete pages in the file editor by clicking on the "Edit Document Pages" button in the toolbar.

This feature is currently in beta, and we’re eager to learn how you use it—and what you’d like to see next. Let us know what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make page-level exclusions even better.

Financial Amount Detector​

We now have the ability to detect financial amounts in documents and suggest them as potential redactions. This can be helpful if your documents contain sensitive financial performance or pricing information. This feature is currently available via opt-in. To have this detector added to your tenant, please send a quick note to support@phaselab.co or get in touch via the in-app chat.

Additional Improvements​

• 100x performance improvement when working in larger (100+ page) documents.
• Added support for OCR in email attachments.
• Notifications can now be dismissed with a click and show a visual countdown before disappearing.
• Documents in triage mode can now be zoomed, a helpful addition when triaging large spreadsheets or images.
• Returning to the file list from a file will now open the appropriate file-type tab.
• Improved performance of next/previous document button for cases with 10k+ files.
• Fixed a bug in triage mode that would cause the second file in the list to briefly show a loading state.

Automatic OCR for Images and Documents​

We're pleased to announce that OCR support is now available to all customers! OCR (short for Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that converts scanned documents, images, and PDFs containing text into machine-readable and searchable content.

With OCR enabled, your files become significantly more accessible and actionable – whether you're processing scans of old documents or screenshots of chat messages.

Images containing text will now be searchable, receive redaction suggestions and be included in case-wide redactions.

OCR is available by default across all plans, with no additional setup required. Simply upload your documents as usual, and we'll handle the rest in the background.

Finalize Files in Bulk​

Finalizing a file in the product generates the final redacted version of the document, adds that file to your case export, prevents any further changes to the file from actions like case-wide redactions, and generally signals that the work on this file is complete.

We intentionally designed the product to require that files be finalized one at a time to reinforce the role of finalization as a final review. However, in discussions with customers we've heard that for some workflows this approach doesn't make sense and simply creates unneccesary busywork.

To give you more flexibility in the finalization process, we've added the ability to finalize files in bulk. This leverages our existing bulk-action toolbar, so simply select the files that need to be finalized and hit the new Finalize button.

Additional Improvements​

• Resolved an issue that was causing the preview text of a selected redaction to be inconsistent with the actual text of the redaction.
• Improved the accuracy of case-wide redactions for multi-word text selections.
• Improved real-time conversation updates to our in-app chat.
• Fixed a layout issue that was causing user names/emails to overflow out of the navigation panel when in its expanded state.

Comment Enhancements​

Many teams use comments to support redaction review and approval workflows, so we’ve made it easier to track which documents still need attention. You can now see the number of unresolved comments on each file at a glance, resolve threads to clean up the view while keeping the conversation history, and leave comments anywhere in a document – even on non-text files like images. These updates make it easier to stay on top of active conversations and streamline your review process.

In-App Chat Support​

We’re excited to announce that in-app chat support is now live! Providing excellent support has always been a priority for us – many of you already know this firsthand through our shared Slack and Teams channels. This new feature expands that same real-time support experience directly into our product. No chat bots here friends, every message goes straight to a member of our team!

Other Improvements​

• You can now filter the file list on files that do not have a tag. This is useful if you use tags for keeping track of workflow states and want to make sure that all files have been properly tagged.
• We've added the ability to update the status of a case directly from the case list by using the status dropdown.

Additional Fixes​

• Case-wide redactions no longer match on partial words (aka substrings). Previously this behavior resulted in case-wide readactions of small words (often initials or short names) creating redactions in the middle of words that contained the same letter pattern.
• We now properly handle files that are uploaded with the application/vnd.ms-office MIME-type.
• In rare cases when downloading a finalization preview PDF, the default name of the file was incorrect. This has been fixed.

New File Formats​

You can now upload CSV files and have them automatically rendered as a data table. We've also added support for legacy and macro-enabled excel files that end in .xls and .xlsm.

Panning Tool​

We've added a "grabber" or panning mode to the document viewer. This is particularly useful when working on a file with very large dimensions where you need to zoom in a bunch to work with the text.

Additional Fixes​

• When viewing a document, the document is now the only scrollable element on the page. Previously there could be multiple scrollbars for different parts of the page, which made it annoying to navigate within the document.
• Occasionally certain words could not be selected when creating a comment or manual text redaction. Text selection should now be much more reliable and consistent.
• You can now exit area redaction mode by clicking on the area redaction button.
• Creating an area redaction while a document was open in multiple tabs would occasionally make the document fail to finalize. This has been fixed.
• When deleting a policy that is attached to a case you will now receive an error message explaining why you are unable to delete the policy.

Select All Files​

When using the "Select All" checkmark in the file list, you will now see an option to select ALL files in the case, not just the files on the current page of results. This functionality works with filters as well, allowing you to select and take bulk actions on all documents/emails in the case that match a certain filter criteria.

Case Status Updater​

We've made it easier to update the status of a case. Simply click on the status badge while inside a case to select a new status.

Other Bug Fixes and improvements​

• Comment notification emails now include the full text of the comment.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a document to jump to the first page after creating a new redaction.
• Fixed a bug that in rare cases could cause a document's text to be unselectable.

Jump to File Number​

When working on a large stack of documents or emails, it is important to be able to navigate quickly between files. We've made some improvements to how we handle document transitions to faciliate faster navigation between files in a stack.

When clicking the next/previous buttons, you can now rapidly click between files, previewing the titles without having to wait for the entire document to load. If you already know which file you're going to, you can now jump directly to a file by clicking on the number indicator and typing in the file number.

Go to Policy​

This update also includes a small quality of life improvement to the document information panel, which displays various metadata about the current document and case. The policy name will now link you directly to the policy that is being used for the case... helpful if you need to quickly check the policy or make any changes.

Page Counts​

We've added a new column to our email and document file lists that displays the total number of pages of the PDF-rendered version of the file. This can be useful if you need find your largest files, or to quickly check the size of the file before clicking into it.

The pages column is hidden by default, but can easily be enabled by clicking on the table settings button in the top right corner of the file list.

In order to faciliate the growing number of columns in the list view, we've also moved our "needs triage" indicator to the left side of the file list to make it easier to scan the file triage status visually. We really appreciate the feedback from our users on this and always welcome ideas for how we can be improving the platform. Don't hesitate to reach out at help@phaselab.co if you have any questions or feedback.

Image Uploads​

If you need to review and sanitize screenshots or other type of images, you can now upload these directly into Phaselab without having to convert them to PDF first. We currently support the following image types: png, jpg, jpeg, jp2, tif, tiff.

Note that we are not yet applying any OCR to the images, so text contained within uploaded images will not be searchable, selectable or contain redaction suggestions. We're working on rolling out OCR in the near future!

Due Dates​

We've added an optional due date field to the case creation page. This allows you to set a specific date that the case is due. As the due date approaches, an indicator will appear reminding you that the case is due soon. You can update the due date at any time on the case settings page.