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Functionality without complexity
qd documents databases offer the functionality you really need, without hiding it behind a complex interface that you certainly don't need
To learn more about qd, click any of these topics
- Best practices
- Database design and creation
- Data entry
- Searching your database
- Reports
- Images and attached files
You'll also find information in the sidebar -- the column on the righthand side of this page-- about system requirements, databases, and networking.
Best practices
We've incorporated best practices for discovery document management into the core of the qd documents software. Over the past twenty years, we've built thousands of litigation databases, using dozens of software products, for cases worth a few million to a few billion dollars. We've built databases for every kind of document -- engineering, medical, pharmaceutical, military, aviation, financial -- and all kinds of cases -- from products liability to environmental litigation to white collar crime. We've created systems from scratch, and we've stepped in to salvage systems that were built before we arrived and were failing to meet needs.
We've distilled all that experience into standards, best practices, and designs that we use as the starting point for every case on which we work. And now we've built those standards and designs into a software product, the qd documents application.
Database design and creation
The qd documents software simplifies database design and creation. You won't need any technical support to create a new database. In most cases, all you'll need to do is give the database a name and push a button. But here's a little more detail:
The qd documents software has a built-in database design that you can use as-is or modify to meet your needs. To create a new database using the built-in design, all you'll do is name the database and push a button. That design will probably meet your needs for most cases. It allows you to record a lot of information about each document -- the bates number, date, document type, title, author, recipients, privilege information, exhibit information, your own notes, your evaluation of the document's importance and whether it's helpful or harmful. You can even note special charactertistics -- for example, noting that the document has handwritten annotations.
If the basic design is missing something you need, you can modify it -- creating a different design for each case, if you like. You can add fields -- for example, adding a field to record the witnesses or issues to which a document relates.
And once you've modified a design, if you really like it, you can use it over and over. The next time you create a new database, instead of basing that new database on the standard qd design, you can instead re-use the modified design you've created. And again, just give it a name and push a button.
Data entry
We've made it really easy to get data into your qd documents database. We've provided an easy to use data entry screen, and we've built in some tools to reduce the amount of typing you have to do -- both to speed up the work and to minimize errors.
For most fields in the database, we let you create a "vocabulary" -- that's a list of the words or names that show up most frequently in that field. Then, when you start to type an entry into that field, a list pops up that shows possible matches for the word you've started to type. Typically, you'll only need to type a couple of letters to select the word you want. That saves you a lot of typing, and it also means that you're less likely to misspell the word, since you're really just picking the correct spelling from a list.
And here's an important tip: Take a look at qd Help. It's more than just a set of basic "push this button" instructions. It also includes a basic "coding manual" -- best practices for recording information about your documents. As consultants, we've worked with lots of databases -- both databases we built ourselves and those that were built by others. The databases that were the least useful were those where data was captured in a sloppy way, so it couldn't be reliably used or retrieved later. qd's best practices for data entry will help you avoid those errors.
Searching your database
The qd documents software gives you two ways to search your database -- quicksearching and standard searching.
Quicksearch. You'll probably use quicksearching a lot. The quicksearch option appears on every page in a qd database. You can simply type in a word or a date and click the quicksearch button. Quicksearch will immediately search your database and find all the documents that contain your search word or match your date.
Quicksearch will also let you search for documents where your search word appears only in specific fields. All you need to do is pick the field you want to search before clicking the quicksearch button.
Standard Search. Standard searching gives you a lot more power. You can use the standard search to create more complicated searches -- searches where you are looking for documents that meet more complicated criteria. For example, you'd use a standard search to find all the documents that were authored by John Smith and sent to Bill Jones between January 1 and May 30, 2002.
With standard searching you can construct searches that use AND, OR, and NOT. But even here, the qd documents software is less complex than other software packages. We don't force you to remember a complex "query language" or "search syntax". Instead, we let you build your search step by step, picking fields and picking search types as you go. And at each step, we show you the results of that step. For example, we'll tell you that you found 500 documents where John Smith is the author, and that you narrowed that list to the 75 documents he sent to Bill Jones, and then you further narrowed that list to the 45 documents that fell into the right time period.
Saving your search results. If you spend a lot of time searching the database to create a list of documents for a particular purpose -- let's say a list of documents you want to use in John Smith's deposition or the documents you plan to produce to the other side -- you'll want to be able to hang on to that list. In the qd documents software, that's easy. Just click a button to save the list and give it a name.
The qd documents search function will save your list of documents, along with a list of the search steps you used to create the list and any notes you make to help you remember why you saved it. Then later, when you want to work with that list again, you just click a button and your qd documents software will pull those documents together for you again.
Hand-adjusting your search list. If you perform a search to find all the documents that relate to an upcoming deponent, the odds are good that you won't be interested in every document you find. That's ok. While you're reviewing the list, just click "Omit" for any document that you don't consider important, and it will be dropped from your list. Now, if you print or save that list, it will contain only the documents you want it to contain.
Searching a range of dates. Yes, you can search for a specific date or you can search for a range of dates.
Reports
It's easy to run reports on your documents. There are two report formats built into the qd documents software, and you can also define and save simple report layouts of your own -- just select the fields you want to include (from a pop up list of the fields in your database), choose how you want the documents sorted, and give the report a name.
Once you've created a report layout, you can use it over and over again in any of your qd documents databases.
Images and attached files
There are two ways you can connect your qd documents database records to the documents they represent: you can use images or -- in the case of documents that are already in electronic form -- you can attach the actual document file.
Images. The qd documents application includes a simple image viewer (many litigation support applications charge hundreds of dollars extra for an image viewer; our simple viewer is built right in). This viewer will display images that you've stored in a standard single-page image format, typically TIFF or JPEG.
Attachments. You may have some documents in their original electronic format -- for example, an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation, a product manual in PDF format, a Quicktime movie, a podcast, or a Word document. In that situation, you can simply attach the file to your qd document record. You can attach any number of files to a single qd document. There's only one important thing to remember: You can attach any file you like, but to view an attached file, you'll need to have the right software to open it. So, for example, to view an attached Quicktime movie, you'll need the Quicktime software.
System requirements. The qd documents software runs on both Macs and Windows machines. On a Mac, you should be running a G4, G5, or Intel Mac with a minimum of 512MB memory and OS X Tiger.
On a Windows machine, you need at least a Pentium 4 with 512MB memory and Windows XP (Service Pack 2).
On both Mac and Windows, you need a 1024 x 768 display or better.
Number of databases. The qd documents software does not limit the number of databases you can create.
Database size. First, we need to define terms, because people sometimes interchange the words "document" and "page". A single document can contain a lot of pages. Thus, a database that contains 2,000 documents might contain 6,000 pages. When we talk about database size, we're talking about the number of documents in the database, not the number of pages.
The qd documents application is intended for cases that involve a few hundred or a few thousand documents, each of which may comprise multiple pages.
On a G4 Mac and a Pentium 4 Windows machine, we've found that a database with a few thousand documents (representing about 10,000 pages) peformed fine. You'll have even better performance on faster computers. You should not use qd documents databases in cases that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of documents.
Network access. qd documents databases can be shared by multiple users across a network. The databases can be shared directly, one user to another, or they can be shared using a central "server".
When users share a database among themselves, without a server, one user acts as the "host" and the other users log into the host's copy of the database across the network. Performance will depend on the host machine and the network, but this type of sharing typically works well if two to four users are sharing the database at one time. If you want to support more users than that, you should use a qd documents server. A server can support more than 100 simultaneous users. (Contact us for more information about qd documents servers).
Remember: Each qd documents user must have a license and must have the qd documents software installed on his or her machine, in order to use a shared database stored on another computer.
