Tag Archives: software

Guide to IPRO Eclipse Publish Case: Customizing Your Workspace

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By Luzevelia Morales

If discovery is produced to you as an IPRO Eclipse SE Publish Case (IPRO Publish Case) and clicking around it feels like this photo below, what can you do?

First, you will know you have an IPRO Publish case because your discovery will look like this:

If Eclipse is new to you or otherwise unfamiliar, trying to use the program can be *extremely* frustrating. If you would like one-on-one training to learn how to work with an IPRO Publish case, contact Kelly_scribner@fd.org to schedule an online video conference. In a one-on-one training session NLST can meet with you virtually, see your screen, and show you how to use the IPRO Publish case viewer to review your discovery production. This blog post is the first of a series meant to help you get started on your IPRO Publish Case. It will introduce IPRO Publish, explain the basic formatting of the program, and how to customize your workspace to make it more user-friendly. Future posts will cover how to search, tag, and export.

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Lab Notes: Audio Transcription Tools

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By Nakiyyah Adams

How do you review hundreds of jail calls? What about 3 months of 24-hour video surveillance on a house? Twenty bodycameras covering  1-2 hours each of a multi-jurisdictional car chase and stop?

Audio transcription tools are one potential answer. These tools can analyze audio and video files and create text searchable transcripts. You can imagine the huge time-saving benefit here—instead of trying to watch or listen to hours and hours of recordings, only some of which might be relevant, a text searchable transcript could be searched using keywords, or even just read quickly in less time than experiencing the recording in real-time.

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Guide: Creating Automatic Batch Video Snapshots

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By Nelson Garcia and Carl Adams

Have you ever had the need to automatically create multiple snapshots\still images of a video to later use in court or perhaps to analyze the image from that video? We know programs such as VLC can take single snapshots of a video while the video is playing but what if I want to take a snapshot every 10 or 30 frames or even every 10 or 30 seconds of a particular video? Here are three programs that you can use to automatically save multiple snapshots from a single video.

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eDiscovery Review platforms (Eclipse, Casepoint, Everlaw): What are they, and why should I consider using one?

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By Alicia Penn, Luzevelia Morales and Tisha Davis

When the government produces discovery to defense teams, it is not always in a user-friendly way. Sometimes the problem is volume—there are so many separate files that it would take decades to lay eyes on all of them. The problem could be organization (or, rather, the apparent lack of it)—the folder structure is cumbersome and/or illogical. Naming convention can be a non-starter—there is an index, but the filenames give you no clue about the file contents.

One answer is to use a review platform. A review platform is software that allows you to view a variety of document types in a single place without having to go through nested folders. Other review platform functions include the ability to tag documents, run text-based searches, create notes, and organize documents. Review platforms are particularly helpful in email-heavy cases because they show the path of an email and any attachments. They also can facilitate collaboration.

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Reduce Background Noise in Audio Files with Audacity

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By Nelson Garcia

Audacity is a free software program that can record and edit audio files. It supports all major audio formats. With it, you can convert files from format to format, such as from WAV to MP3. You can also use it to reduce background noise in audio files.

To reduce background noise in Audacity, first open your audio file in the program. As with all discovery, please make sure to always work with a copy of the discovery file and never the original.

Select a section of the audio containing only the noise that you want to reduce or remove. Try the beginning or the end of your recording or look for a good pause somewhere in your audio file.  The key is to select an area with minimal activity. On the file this looks like a flat line.  Select enough of the audio to get a good analysis of the noise. Figure 1 below shows what this minimal activity looks like:

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