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eDiscovery (preview) is now available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. To learn more about using the new eDiscovery experience, see Learn about eDiscovery (preview).
When you create a new document, you generally start with one or more ideas that you want to convey in the document, and then compose the document using words that align with these ideas. The more prevalent an idea is, the more frequent the words that are related to that idea tend to be. This method also aligns to how readers consume documents. The important things to understand from reading a document are the main ideas that the document is trying to convey. This also includes which ideas appear where and what the relationships between the ideas are.
This process can be extended to how an eDiscovery reviewer wants to consume a set of documents in a case. They want to see which ideas are present in the review sets and which documents are talking about those ideas. If they find a particular document of interest, they want to be able to see documents that discuss similar ideas.
The Themes functionality in eDiscovery (Premium) attempts to mimic how humans reason about documents, by analyzing the themes that are discussed in a review set and assigning a theme to documents in the review set. In eDiscovery (Premium), Themes goes one step further and identifies the dominant theme in each review set and document. The dominant theme is the one that appears the most often in a document.
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The Themes functionality analyzes documents with text in a review set to parse out common themes that appear across all the documents in the review set. eDiscovery (Premium) assigns those themes to the documents in which they appear. It also labels each theme with the words used in the documents that are representative of the theme. Because a document can contain various types of subject matter, eDiscovery (Premium) often assigns multiple themes to review sets and documents. This is referred to as the Themes list. The theme that appears most prominently in a review set or document is designated as its dominant theme.
Themes are supported for cases and apply to all the review sets within them. You can configure the settings for themes when you create a new case or you can update the theme settings for an existing case.
Note
For a limited time, this classic eDiscovery experience is also available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. Enable Compliance portal classic eDiscovery experience in eDiscovery (preview) experience settings to display the classic experience in the new Microsoft Purview portal.
To configure themes when you create a new case, complete the following steps:
After a new case is created, analytics are automatically run on the data when the review sets are added to the case. Themes for the review sets are generated as part of the analytics processing.
Note
For a limited time, this classic eDiscovery experience is also available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. Enable Compliance portal classic eDiscovery experience in eDiscovery (preview) experience settings to display the classic experience in the new Microsoft Purview portal.
To configure themes for an existing case, complete the following steps:
After the analytics job completes, you can view the themes that were generated for the review set by filtering the documents in the review set by theme.
Note
For a limited time, this classic eDiscovery experience is also available in the new Microsoft Purview portal. Enable Compliance portal classic eDiscovery experience in eDiscovery (preview) experience settings to display the classic experience in the new Microsoft Purview portal.
Filtering documents by theme can significantly save time when reviewing documents. For example, if you're looking for documents that discuss a particular topic, you can filter the documents by the dominant theme that is related to that topic. You can also filter documents by other themes in the theme list to find documents that are similar to a document that you're interested in. To display the themes for a document as a column in the document list for the review set, select Customize columns and select Dominant theme and Themes list.
To filter documents by theme, complete the following steps:
To filter documents by theme using advanced filters (preview), complete the following steps:
Events
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