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Themes in eDiscovery (Premium)

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When you create a new document, you generally start with one or more ideas that you want to convey in the document, and then compose the document using words that align with these ideas. The more prevalent an idea is, the more frequent the words that are related to that idea tend to be. This method also aligns to how readers consume documents. The important things to understand from reading a document are the main ideas that the document is trying to convey. This also includes which ideas appear where and what the relationships between the ideas are.

This process can be extended to how an eDiscovery reviewer wants to consume a set of documents in a case. They want to see which ideas are present in the review sets and which documents are talking about those ideas. If they find a particular document of interest, they want to be able to see documents that discuss similar ideas.

The Themes functionality in eDiscovery (Premium) attempts to mimic how humans reason about documents, by analyzing the themes that are discussed in a review set and assigning a theme to documents in the review set. In eDiscovery (Premium), Themes goes one step further and identifies the dominant theme in each review set and document. The dominant theme is the one that appears the most often in a document.

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How does themes work?

The Themes functionality analyzes documents with text in a review set to parse out common themes that appear across all the documents in the review set. eDiscovery (Premium) assigns those themes to the documents in which they appear. It also labels each theme with the words used in the documents that are representative of the theme. Because a document can contain various types of subject matter, eDiscovery (Premium) often assigns multiple themes to review sets and documents. This is referred to as the Themes list. The theme that appears most prominently in a review set or document is designated as its dominant theme.

Configuring Themes

Themes are supported for cases and apply to all the review sets within them. You can configure the settings for themes when you create a new case or you can update the theme settings for an existing case.

Configure Themes when creating a new case

Note

For a limited time, this classic eDiscovery experience is also available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. Enable Compliance portal classic eDiscovery experience in eDiscovery (preview) experience settings to display the classic experience in the new Microsoft Purview portal.

To configure themes when you create a new case, complete the following steps:

  1. In the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, navigate to eDiscovery > Premium.
  2. Select the Cases tab and open an eDiscovery (Premium) case, and then select Create a case.
  3. On the Name and description page, name the case and complete the Description, Number, and Case format options as applicable. Select Next to continue.
  4. On the Members and settings page, select Group items by theme. Select the following theme options as applicable:
    • Maximum number of themes: Specifies the maximum number of themes that can be generated when you run analytics on the data in review sets included in a case. For more information on limits, see Limits in eDiscovery (Premium).
    • Add numeric identifiers to themes: Numbers (that identify a theme) are included when generating themes.
    • Automatically set maximum number of themes: In certain situations, there may not be enough documents in a review set to produce the desired number of themes for the case. When this setting is enabled, eDiscovery (Premium) adjusts the maximum number of themes dynamically rather than attempting to enforce the maximum number of themes.
  5. If you need to exclude keywords associated with themes, enter the text or regular expression needed in the Text to ignore field. In the Apply to field, select Themes to apply the text or regular expression to all themes.
  6. Complete the other field on the Members and settings page as applicable, then select Next.
  7. On the Summary page, review the case settings, then select Submit to create the case.

After a new case is created, analytics are automatically run on the data when the review sets are added to the case. Themes for the review sets are generated as part of the analytics processing.

Configure Themes for an existing case

Note

For a limited time, this classic eDiscovery experience is also available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. Enable Compliance portal classic eDiscovery experience in eDiscovery (preview) experience settings to display the classic experience in the new Microsoft Purview portal.

To configure themes for an existing case, complete the following steps:

  1. In the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, navigate to eDiscovery > Premium.
  2. Select the Cases tab and open an eDiscovery (Premium) case.
  3. Select the Settings tab, and then choose Select on the Search & analytics card.
  4. On the Search & analytics page, select the Themes checkbox and configure the following options as applicable:
    • Max number of themes: Specifies the maximum number of themes that can be generated when you run analytics on the data in review sets included in a case. For more information on limits, see Limits in eDiscovery (Premium).
    • Include numbers themes: Numbers (that identify a theme) are included when generating themes.
    • Adjust maximum number of themes dynamically: In certain situations, there may not be enough documents in a review set to produce the desired number of themes for the case. When this setting is enabled, eDiscovery (Premium) adjusts the maximum number of themes dynamically rather than attempting to enforce the maximum number of themes.
  5. If you need to exclude keywords associated with themes, select Edit in the Ignore text section. Enter the text or regular expression needed in the Text (Regular expressions are supported) field. In the Apply to field, select Themes to apply the text or regular expression to all themes.
  6. Select Save to save the theme settings.
  7. Navigate to the review set in the case that you want to apply the new theme settings to, and select Analytics > Run Document & email analytics.
  8. Select Yes to confirm that you want to run analytics on the review set.

After the analytics job completes, you can view the themes that were generated for the review set by filtering the documents in the review set by theme.

Filtering documents by Theme

Note

For a limited time, this classic eDiscovery experience is also available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. Enable Compliance portal classic eDiscovery experience in eDiscovery (preview) experience settings to display the classic experience in the new Microsoft Purview portal.

Filtering documents by theme can significantly save time when reviewing documents. For example, if you're looking for documents that discuss a particular topic, you can filter the documents by the dominant theme that is related to that topic. You can also filter documents by other themes in the theme list to find documents that are similar to a document that you're interested in. To display the themes for a document as a column in the document list for the review set, select Customize columns and select Dominant theme and Themes list.

To filter documents by theme, complete the following steps:

  1. In a review set, choose Filters and expand the options for Analytics & predictive coding.
  2. Select Dominant theme and Themes list, and then select Done to add these filters to the review set.
  3. Use the conditional controls as needed to filter the documents by specific themes for each of these filters.

To filter documents by theme using advanced filters (preview), complete the following steps:

  1. In a review set, choose Select a filter and select Dominant theme.
  2. Select an operator to use with the Dominant theme and define the value to use with the operator.
  3. Use an addition Themes list filter and the operator and values to applicable to this filter. You can configure the AND and OR operators to filter documents by a combination of the Dominant theme and Themes list values.