Searching Case Documents
To access the Case Document Search, a case must be open. The Search Case Documents option is available from within the Documents drop-down menu, as an option within the left-hand navigation of a case, and also as its own tab within a case to the left of the Activity tab.
Search Case Documents allows users to find matches in the document title, activity description of a document, as well as the contents of documents. It even searches through message (email) bodies for all of your linked messages. Many firms find this tool powerful when searching for a specific phrase, social security number of a client, checking for conflicts, and more!
Note
It may take up to a couple of hours for recently uploaded documents to appear in the search results, but they usually appear within minutes.Advanced Search
Entering your search terms into the Search/Filter bar will automatically start looking through all your case documents. By default, the search bar uses the Anything filter, but you can always change what filter to use or add multiple filters.
Any table in MerusCase allows for filtering across any of the columns on your screen to provide the user a tailored list within the system. In other words, use the filter to quickly find a specific line item within the table.
Additionally, MerusCase supports the use of multiple filters at once. For instance, a user can search for all open (by the Case Status column) cases within Browse Cases and then apply a second filter to then search for Assigned to Me (by the Staff column) within those open cases.
To apply multiple filters, enter the first filter then click on the magnifying glass. On click, a drop-down window will appear. Click Add Filter and toggle what to filter by.
Select Always use this column if you wish to always use the same filter type. Many firms find it particularly useful to select this option when filtering for cases, forms, or templates.
Pro-Tip
MerusCase filtering has very powerful Search and Filter Tricks available to you, such as Custom Filter Shortcuts, powerful keywords, Preset Filters and even more!To remove a filter, click on the added filter button (each applied filter appears as a button underneath the Search/Filter bar). For example, to remove the filter for open cases, click on the button Status: Open underneath the Search/Filter bar.
The following are the available option Filter:
- Anything: Searches using all options below.
- Filename Only: Search focuses on searching through document names.
- Activity Description Only: Search focuses on the description of documents.
- Document Content Only: Search focuses on the content (body) of documents.
Additionally, it is possible to limit the date range of your search results by setting time frame boundaries in the Date Created: From & To fields.
Finally, you can also focus your search on specific document tags in Filter on Activity Tag. Multiple tags can be selected by using the ‘Shift’ or ‘Ctrl’ (Windows) and “Cmd” (MacOS users) keys.
Each result in the search contains the document name, highlighted matching search terms, case name, activity tags, and a timestamp.
As an example, say that you need to find all emails, for the month of August, where in the subject line it said “Re: John Sample v Sample Employer.”
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Using the magnifying glass, click on it and from Filter select Activity Description. For this case, we are using Activity Description since all email subject lines fall under this column in the Activity list.
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Under the Date Created section, select the From and To dates, which would be 08/01/2018 and 08/31/2018.
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In the last section, Filter on Activity Tag, scroll through the list and select “Message” since all emails are tagged as so. As mentioned above, you can select multiple tags in this section.
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Finally, in the search bar, type in “Re: John Sample v Sample Employer”.
Searching Case Documents Folder Structure
Within Search Case Documents, documents are separated into folders according to the tags that were used on documents within the case. To view all of the documents within a tag, simply click on the tag name and a list of documents will expand.
Note
Documents that only have the Document tag will not appear within a folder and are listed below the last folder. At any point, you can add a document into a folder or create a new folder by tagging it with an existing tag. If none of the tags in the list fit your needs, ask your firm administrator to add a new tag into the firm's account.If a document has more than one tag, not including the default Document tag, it will appear under each tag’s folder. For example, say that you have a document named “client_report” that has the tags “Medical Report” and “Subpoena Record.” This document will then appear under the folders “Medical Report” and “Subpoena Record.”
