from Oxford Law and Computing
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Openlaw Document Handling Software
from Oxford Law and Computing |
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Navigation: Reference > Main Screen Components |
  
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This page gives you an overview of the main components of Openlaw. You can read more about each of them either by following the links on this page or by going to the Index.
Click on an image to see a larger copy of it or to read more about it.
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The Control Panel All operations are accessed from the Control Panel, shown here. The functions of the buttons and menus are summarised below and described in detail in separate sections of this Manual. |
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View
If you press the View button from the Control Panel, you see either a tabular display of your Selection in the Grid View, a tabular display of the primary fields used in a Disclosure List....
or the first Item in the Selection is an Item Card
This Tab shows the primary information usually appearing in a List of Documents. A fee earner reviewing the List can move quickly from Item to Item using the arrows at the bottom.
A single click in any of the boxes In List or Privileged will mark or unmark an Item as being in the List to be served or as Privileged. A click in the Review box marks an Item as needing a further check, or perhaps clears a tick put in by an assistant to draw the Item to the partner's attention.
Any of these pieces of information can be used as tags to search for Items. New Items can be added from here or existing ones edited.
The image, if required, will be displayed to the right.
You can turn the image display on or off by checking/unchecking the Image checkbox at the bottom of the Tab screen.
The Tabs
All the information about an Item is displayed on the Tabs. Click on a Tab Name below to see a more detailed page about it.
The summary page of key information relevant to a simple Disclosure list. You could do a list of documents without looking at any other tab except the Names tab. |
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The Senders and Recipients |
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Various fields for expanded information about a Document, including Subject for a summary. |
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44 check boxes with user-definable labels. These can be checked or left unchecked to equate to Yes/No flags |
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Mainly internal information, most of which is captured automatically and cannot be edited. It includes two sets of Bates Numbers which can be edited – these will usually be numbers inherited from another party’s document store |
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Links between Items and Names such as Copied to or Mentioned in. The relationship types are user-definable |
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Links between two or more Items such as Has as a copy / Is a copy of |
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User-defined Keywords or free-form text for background information or shared comment |
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Includes Site Comments (as opposed to those which are circulated to others) and the text of the documents themselves if you have chosen to OCR them (that is, apply the process of Optical Character Recognition to extract the text from the images). |
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Shows which Bundles an Item is included in. |
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Images
Openlaw will display and print any electronic file which your PC knows how to handle. A wider range of controls and options are available for .tiff image files (such as the ability to print numbers on the pages) but Openlaw will handle Word .DOC files, Excel .XLS spreadsheets, .JPG pictures, .DWG drawings, sound files or videos or anything else which can be viewed with the human eye and which your computer knows how to handle.
Click on the file above to see .PDF and the original Word versions of the same document.
This ability to display any file type means that you can assemble a Case very quickly out of a mixture of existing electronic files and scanned images of paper files. This includes e-mail messages.
Click on the picture to see a larger version
There are several Query tools.
The simplest form of Query is the Quick Query which allows you to search key fields with minimal keystrokes.
The main Query Wizard is a sophisticated tool for searching the Case. Searches can be as simple or as complex as is needed and can involve one or several fields, single or multiple index orders and a range of Boolean operators such as equals, contains, greater than etc.
You can make sub-queries of Bundles, that is, refine an existing Selection. There is also a range of simpler query options.
The Report button on the Control Panel takes you the report shown here. The current selection appears on screen in the format of a standard List of Documents. Pressing the printer icon at the bottom of the window gives you your list of documents.
There are a number of other output options including Word for Windows. This allows you to choose a file name and destination and save your Report as a Microsoft Word document, a spreadsheet, or an export file in various formats.
The print option More Reports takes you to a wider selection of output options (if Microsoft Access is installed on your PC).
Bundles
You can save Selections as Bundles. Once saved they can be recalled and merged and used
as the basis for a number of core functions
Click on the picture to see a larger version
