In general, GoldFynch and other eDiscovery software expect the documents coming into the system to already be unitized (split into logical, individual documents/files). If they are not, (e.g.,  a bulk PDF production sent as a single document), there are a couple of options to unitize the PDF pages.

  1. Bursting every page into a separate document.
  2. Splitting at special markers. For example, if the bulk PDF contains multiple email addresses, we could attempt to split it into individual emails by looking for "To:, From:,  Subject:" words on a page.
  3.  If the PDF file originally had bookmarks for each of the separate documents in the combined file, then Adobe provides a convenient way to split the file based on these top-level bookmarks. Instructions can be found here. (This would be done outside of GoldFynch using Adobe, and once files are split, you could load them back into your case)


If the above options are not feasible, GoldFynch's "document annotations" feature may help:


  1. Highlight/select some text on an important page
  2. Click the highlighter pen icon that appears to mark & save the selection


Thereafter, the page number and selected text will show up on the right-hand panel under "Document Annotations," along with a button that will take you straight to the page & the highlighted text. Information on the annotations feature can be found here.


In this example, clicking "Page 45" on the right will scroll directly to the appropriate page and highlight the text. 


"Page 45" on the right will scroll directly to the appropriate page and highlight the text.


Note: 

  • It can be a complicated and unfeasible process to search or filter specifically for documents that have these kinds of text highlights/annotations that were entered for navigation, and it may be more efficient to tag the documents with a unique tag like "FOR JOHN REVIEW" so that you can find the documents easily. 
  • If you do want to search for files with such highlights/annotations, you can do so using the "document-notes" advanced search parameter, e.g.: 
    document-notes EXISTS  - which will return all files with highlights/annotations
    document-notes CONTAINS ANY-OF ("prologue", "page 3", "page 59") - using this you can set up a saved search by manually entering in the text you left the highlights on. This may not be feasible when dealing with large volumes of files though 


Additional information on court decisions regarding Document Unitization can be found at "Identifying Logical Document Breaks in eDiscovery Order" (Bowtielaw.com Aug. 8, 2021)