About documents

The Documents page is your team's document home. Everything the team has uploaded or generated appears there, in a table you can filter, sort, and arrange to suit the work in front of you. Start with what a document actually is — it is more than a single file.

Documents carry versions

A document is a container, not a single file. Upload a new version and it joins the versions already there: the document keeps its identity, its title, its tags, and its place in your collections. The Versions column goes up by one. That is what lets a document accumulate drafts and counterparty mark-ups over the life of a matter without becoming a scatter of near-identical entries.

What happens after you upload

Uploading a file does not finish the job on its own. The file is stored, and processing then runs in the background. You can carry on working, or close the page, while it does. You will be notified when initial document processing is complete.

A document becomes usable in stages rather than all at once. Its text is extracted first, then indexed so it can be searched and used elsewhere in the app. Word documents are additionally broken down into their clause structure. Each stage is tracked separately, so anything that needs only the text can start as soon as the text is there.

The Status column shows the current status of all processing on a particular document. Hover over it for details.

Organise your documents

There are two key, complementary, ways to organise your documents:

• Collections group documents into folders. When your team has collections, rows group under collapsible folder headers, and you can drag a document from one folder to another. Documents in no collection sit ungrouped.
• Tags are labels applied across documents, independent of collections. They come from a vocabulary the whole team shares, so everyone tags the same things the same way.

See Organise documents.

Document actions live in the action bar

You do not create documents from the table itself. The action bar that runs across the top of the app carries four document actions, so they are available wherever you are:

• New — upload files, create a document from a template, or write a text document.
• Templates — your team's templates and the documents produced from them.
• Organise — the team's collections and tags.
• Navigator — a view of how your documents relate to one another. See Explore documents with the navigator.

You can have more than one documents table

The page starts with a single table called Documents. You can add more, and each keeps its own columns, filters, and sort. One table for the matter you are working on, another for the team's precedents, a third for what you are reviewing this week — each remembers how you left it.

The tables are yours. Changing the columns on one does not change what anyone else sees. See Manage document tables.