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 and production processes.

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. The partial production of email families is not a best practice, nor is this method of production readily accepted by most attorneys.

Propagation of Coding

This feature allows the user to consistently code email families and is located in the doc viewer under the DISC heading.  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 an email family is coded as Responsive, Privileged,  Work Product, or Confidential. If an email parent is coded as Non-Responsive, Needs Further Review, or with a custom field, the coding will not propagate to the attachment children.

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