Legal Apps Search Primer

Prefix Queries

You can search for documents that contain words with a prefix using a ’*’.

For example:

dog*

would return all document containing the word ‘dogs’ or ‘dogma’ or ‘dogal’ …

Phrases

To search for an exact series of words in order place double quotes around the search term.

For example:

“cats and dogs”

will return all documents that contain the word ‘cats’, immediately followed by the word ‘and’, immediately followed by the word ‘dogs’.

Logical Operators

IMPORTANT: All operators must be UPPER CASE.

By default searching for multiple words will return documents that contain all of the submitted words.

For example searching for:

cats dogs

Will find documents that have the word ‘cats’ and ‘dogs’.

OR

You can search for documents that contain any of the submitted words by using the ‘OR’ keyword. Note that the OR must be in upper case.

For example searching for:

cats OR dogs

will find documents that contain either ‘cats’, ‘dogs’ or both.

NOT

You can explicitly exclude documents which contain the word ‘dogs’ from the search using the NOT operator.

For example:

cats NOT dogs

Grouping

For more advanced searches, you may need to explicitly group search clauses together.

For example, lets assume you want to search for all documents that contain the word ‘mice’ that also contain either the word ‘cats’ or ‘dogs’

Use this:

mice (cats OR dogs)

This will NOT work:

mice cats OR dogs

it will return all documents that contain both ‘mice’ and ‘cats’ as well as all documents that contain the word ‘dogs’.