Mark up a document for the team

A key document has come in: the termination letter, the board minutes, the expert report. Before the team meeting you want the passages that matter highlighted, with a note beside each one saying why, so a colleague who opens the document sees what you saw without reading it from the start.

Two questions decide how you mark it up. Who else can open this document? Everyone who can open it sees your mark-up. And does the copy that leaves the firm need to be clean?

Highlight the passages that matter

1. Open the matter's Documents and click the document. It opens beside its details, in the document viewer.

   PDFs open in the viewer with its mark-up tools. Emails, images and video open in viewers of their own, which have no mark-up tools.

2. Select the passage. In the small toolbar that appears over the selection, choose the highlight. To mark several passages in a row, choose the Text Highlighter in the viewer's toolbar and drag across each passage in turn.

   

3. To say why a passage matters, choose the Note tool in the viewer's toolbar, click on the page beside the passage and type, for example "Notice given 3 days late: see clause 14.2". Keep the note to the point the team needs; the reasoning belongs in the memo.

Your highlights and notes are saved with the document as you make them.

Go through the mark-up

1. Open the sidebar from the left of the viewer's toolbar and choose Annotations. The list shows every highlight and note in the document, page by page, with the highlighted text.

   

2. Click an entry to go straight to it in the document. This is the quickest way to take a colleague through the points in a call.

3. To remove a highlight or note that is no longer needed, select it in the document and delete it with the bin in the toolbar that appears, or press Delete, then confirm.

Send a copy out

• Export PDF in the viewer's toolbar saves a PDF of the document with the highlights and notes in it, for a colleague or counsel who works outside Juristic.
• Download the original document saves the file exactly as it was uploaded, without any mark-up. Use it whenever the document goes to the client, the other side or the court.

Tips from practice

• Everyone who can open the document sees the mark-up, and can change it. That includes a client or an outside adviser who has been given access to the document. Keep notes factual, and check who has access before you write anything you would not show them; see decide what clients see on a matter.
• Some highlights are Juristic's. When an event on the timeline was taken from the document, its passage is highlighted too, and it shows in the Annotations list. Delete only the highlights and notes you made yourself.
• Scans first. A scanned document has no text to select until it has been read. Click OCR in the viewer's toolbar first; see make scanned documents searchable.
• A highlight is not a link. To tie a passage to the chronology, link the document to the event, or create the event from the selected text; see link each event to its evidence.

Going through a whole disclosure set rather than one document? See review the documents disclosed by the other side.