Email Families & Propagation of Coding

This technical note discusses how the Lexbe eDiscovery Platform (LEP) handles email families during the review and production processes, as well as the Propagate Coding feature.

Email Families

The email parent and its attachment children are maintained as a family in LEP, and LEP is designed to prevent such families from being broken during the review process.

Benefits of Maintaining and Consistently Coding Email Families

This design feature helps minimize the risk of potentially waiving privilege through the inadvertent partial release of a privileged email or its attachments. As the protection of privileged information is such a critical matter, Lexbe has designed its software to safeguard against a potential waiver of these protections whenever possible.  An additional benefit of maintaining email families, is that email families in LEP may be coded as a group when the Propagate Coding feature is selected.  Use of the propagation feature increases the speed of review and the consistency of privilege coding. By preventing inconsistent coding, the production of partial email families can be avoided. 

Propagation of Coding

This feature allows the user to consistently code email families. When Propagate Coding is checked, coding for the current document will be copied to all members of that specific email family, overwriting prior coding. Coding propagates only when a document is coded as Responsive, Attorney-Client Privilege, Attorney Work Product, or Confidential. If an email parent is coded as Non-Responsive, Needs Further Review or with a custom tag/field, the coding will not propagate to the attachment children.  

To access and change the Propagation of Coding feature, open a document in the document viewer, and look at the "Save" options in the upper right corner. 

Save, Propagate & Continue: Both Auto Advance and Propagate Coding are selected. When "Save, Propagate and Continue" is clicked, LEP wil (1) save the current coding; (2) if the coding is applied to a member of an email family, propagate the Responsiveness, Confidential or Privilege coding to the other members of the email family; and (3) automatically advance to the next document for review. See the Document Viewer Help Page. 

General Rules of Propagating Coding

The propagation tool works in favor of Responsive and Privilege coding, therefore, there are some general rules/limitations.  

Lexbe WILL propagate as follows:

1)      Coding a record "Responsive" always propagates to the whole family

2)      Coding a record "Privilege" always propagates to the whole family

3)      Coding a record "Work Product" always propagates to the whole family

4)      Coding a record “Confidential” always propagates to the whole family

Lexbe WILL NOT propagate as follows:

1)      Coding a record "Not Specified" NEVER propagates to the family

2)      Coding a record "Non-Responsive" NEVER propagates to the family

3)      Coding a record "Needs Further Review" NEVER propagates to the family

4)      Clearing the "Privilege" flag NEVER propagates to other records

5)      To custom fields