Tag Archives: microsoft excel

Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks for CJA Cases: Pivot Tables for Financial Fraud Analysis

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By Alicia Penn and Joe Wanzala

This post is part of an ongoing series of videos on how Microsoft Excel can help CJA practitioners (including attorneys, paralegals, investigators, and mitigation specialists) in their CJA cases.

Previous Post: Formatting Tables
Today’s Post: Pivot Tables for Financial Fraud Analysis

Introduction:

You might get a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in your discovery. Things like bank records, call detail records, cell tower data, or tax documents are often produced in this format, as Excel (.XLSX) or .CSV files. This is good! The benefit to getting data in an Excel file, as opposed to a PDF, is that Excel will let you easily sort and filter data. For example, if you get telephone call logs in Excel format, you can easily sort the calls by date and time. You can filter that information to select specific telephone numbers and review just those calls quickly. This would be difficult to do with a PDF and would take much longer. [https://nlsblog.org/category/software-guides/excel/ ].

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Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks for CJA Cases: Formatting Tables

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This post is part of an ongoing series of videos on how Microsoft Excel can help CJA practitioners (including attorneys, paralegals, investigators, and mitigation specialists) in their CJA cases.

Previous Post: Filename Lists
Today’s Post: Formatting Tables

CJA panel attorneys and federal defenders frequently receive some of their discovery in spreadsheet or Excel format. Call detail records and indices listing information regarding discovery productions (often called document indexes) are two examples. Having the files in Excel format instead of PDF is advantageous as spreadsheets are designed to sort and filter information, either by a single or multiple criteria. With voluminous information, this ability to sort and filter by multiple criteria can speed up review and allow you to identify the information you are interested in. For example, if you have telephone call records in Excel format, it is easy to filter by a number of phone numbers and quickly narrow the entries to review with several clicks. If the same information is in PDF format, it would have to be done manual and take much, much more time.

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Working with Email in Discovery: Processing Options and Review Workflows

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Introduction

Technologies that allow for easier review of ediscovery in native format have become more affordable and accessible. Working with files in native format has several advantages including avoiding loss of potentially relevant information, access to metadata and better searchability. Email is one of the most common of the native formats produced in discovery. This article will explore some approaches for processing email and identify a number of low-cost of tools that can assist. (This article deals with the processing but not the substantive review of emails for case analysis – for this you should consider other tools such as CaseMap, or – for larger collections of emails – review platforms such as Casepoint or IPRO.)

The tools and approaches you select will depend on a combination of three factors: (1) volume, (2) format(s) and (3) the defense team goals. While a single tool might facilitate a discreet goal, more involved goals may require different approaches with a combination of tools. These scenarios can be ends in themselves or phases in an overall workflow. This article does not try to anticipate every possible situation that might arise but will explore a few common scenarios.

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