Search syntax guidance

Your search condition can consist of a simple search for a value in any of the default fields or a directed search for a value in a specific field. In addition, you can add operators to join conditions for complex searches. By providing search conditions in any of the following areas, you can perform an action on that subset of documents, such as promote, export, folder, image, OCR, and more.

• In ANALYZE>FILTER, provide search conditions in Keyword, by typing the syntax in the field or in a text file.
• In ANALYZE>INSPECT provide search conditions by typing in the Search box or using Search Builder.
• In REVIEW provide search conditions by typing in the Search box or using Search Builder.

When providing search conditions, be aware of the following general rules. Additional sections in this topic describe specific aspects of search.

Category	General rule
Stop words	Unlike some products, Epiq Discovery indexes all words in documents, including stop words. Your search can include stop words.
Case sensitivity	Most elements in your search, including logical operators (and, or, and but) and date operators (to and on) are not case sensitive. However, the following search elements are case sensitive. Field names. Capitalize each word of a field name supplied before the parenthesis such as Date_Created(09/01/19). When typing field name for a search, make sure to include an underline character for any spaces in the name, for example: Date_Created. System field values: Values you supply to search system fields are case sensitive. For example, a Custodian name must match the same case used when the name was added. Values you supply are not case sensitive. Both of the following examples return the same result:  Extracted_Text(Attorney Client) Extracted_Text(attorney client)
Accent insensitivity	Search applies accent insensitivity to values you supply. When you supply a term with an unaccented character or an accented character (for example, é or ñ), search returns documents that contain the term using any form of the character (Elise and Élise).

Search default fields

You can search for a value without supplying a field by simply typing the value in Keyword  or Search. When you do so, Epiq Discovery compares the value to the default fields at hand. See the following links for more information about search using values without fields. For example, type a value, such as "Smith" to return documents that contain "Smith" in any of the default fields shown in the following links.

To search for a word in the default fields, just type it. If you supply multiple words, the system searches for the whole phrase.

privilege

John Smith

To view all of the available fields, use Search Builder or view the Search field reference topic.

Search specific fields

A field search targets the search to look for the value only within the specified field. When you type a field name a Keyword or Search, capitalize each word and use an underscore between multiple words. The following list shows some of the available fields.

• System fields: Custodian, Source, Data_Name, Folder, Document_Type, Assignment, Filter_Job, Keyword_Hits, Promote Job, and Production.
• Other fields categorized by type: date fields (Date_Created), number fields (Attachment_Count), document fields (Author), and text fields (Extracted_Text).

To find " cloud" in the Subject field, type the following example.

Subject(cloud)

You can also check supply conditional values, such as IS NULL for empty fields or IS NOT NULL for fields that aren't empty.

Compare number values

Supply comparison operators when you want to compare two numeric values. These operators include operators for equal to, less than, greater than, equal to or less than, and equal to or greater than (=, <, >, <=, and >=).

Supply date ranges

When entering a date, always use MM/DD/YYYY format. Use the ON date operator when you intend to include a specified date. For instances when you want to find a date within known a range, use the date operator TO. To find all dates before or after a specified date, use the * wildcard.

Use logical operators and grouping

When you want to search for multiple criteria, use a boolean operator to connect the criteria. Boolean searches find either inclusive or exclusive matches. Always type logical operators in uppercase. For example, to search for both “Miller” and “contract” in the default fields, supply the following condition.

Miller AND contract

The following list contains the available boolean operators.

• Use AND when you want both terms present.
• Use OR when you want either term present.
• Use NOT when you want to exclude a term.

For grouping, use a set of parentheses to evaluate a group of conditions separately, as shown below. This condition returns matches for Khan with either Adams or Smith.

(Adams OR Smith) AND Khan

If you omit the parentheses, the system evaluates ANDs before ORs, which changes the results of the following example to return either Adams or both Smith and Khan.

Adams OR Smith AND Khan

Wildcards as placeholders

In search criteria, use wildcards as placeholders to represent one or more characters within a single word. A question mark, ?, acts as a placeholder for a single character. An asterisk, *, acts as a placeholder for multiple characters. However, understand that wildcard searches can use a large amount of system resources, which can slow or stall productivity.

Wildcards prove helpful when searching for a word that might be misspelled. For example, the word “privilege” often appears misspelled, but the following example finds most spelling variations of privilege. You can supply wildcards within or outside of quotation marks, as shown below.

priv*ge

"priv*ge"

For optimum performance when using wildcards, place them in the middle or end of a word to return specific results. For example, supply "a*orney" to return attorney with one or more t's to find misspellings. However, avoid supplying wildcards at the beginning of a word or elsewhere where the results would be too open ended to return meaningful results (for example, do not use c* or *ing).

Fuzzy searches

Use a fuzzy search to return approximate matches (within one or two characters) of a supplied term. When using this type of search, the algorithm finds relevant terms by inserting, deleting, or substituting characters. You designate the fuzzy search by providing a term followed by a tilde (~) and a number 1 or 2. Fuzzy searches return the top 50 terms found.

Proximity searches

Use a proximity search to search for a match between two terms that occur near, next to, or in the vicinity of a specified number of words. In the following example, bank W/3 debit returns a hit when the word "debit" appears within three words or less of “bank”. The following text is a match, counting the words as shown. This would also match with fewer words in proximity, such as "bank debit" or "bank transaction debit".

The same example would not hit on "bank transaction credit or debit" because that proximity is four words.

Searches with alphanumeric or special characters

When your search includes words with special characters (such as, - @ $ % . ~ | & \ /), apostrophes, or mixed alphabetic and numeric characters, the following rules apply.

• Words with mixed letters, case, and numbers are treated as a single word (token) in search. To find SD500x, you can search for SD500* or SD500x, but not SD500 because that isn't the complete word.
• Special characters (such as, - @ $ % . ~ | & \ / ) convert to spaces. For example, an email address such as frankie.mason@mycompany.com, is considered four separate words (frankie mason mycompany com).
• Search treats apostrophes (') as a space anywhere they appear, including in possessive words (Sarah's) and contractions (can't). For example, to find "rent isn't due", you can simply type the phrase. But to find similar phrases, such as "rent isn't due" and "rents aren't due", make sure you allow two words for the contraction. In this case, use rent* W/3 due.

• Curly double quotation marks (“ ”) automatically convert to straight double quotation marks (" ").

Reserved words and phrases

Epiq Discovery reserves the use of certain reserved words or phrases, such as TO, ON, AND, OR, NOT, IS NOT NULL, IS NULL. To use any of these reserved words or phrases as literal text, surround the word or phrase with quotes.