Changelog

We've added a more flexible way to apply redactions to documents. Now, when redacting text (or dismissing a suggested redaction) you can choose exactly where it should be applied:

• Just this selection (our existing default behavior)
• Everywhere it occurs in the current document (✨new!)
• Everywhere it occurs in all in-scope, unfinalized documents in the case (previously the "apply to all case documents" toggle).

In real-world workflows like DSARs, context matters. You might need to redact a person's name in some documents, but leave it visible in others. For example, if the requester included another person's name as part of the scope their request you'd likely want to leave it unredacted in that document, but redact it elsewhere in the case. Now with per-document scope, you can handle these situations without over- or under-redacting.

Additional Improvements

• Improved search speed by 5x.
• Added ability to filter search results by document type.
• Improved reliability of document deduplication for users with resource-constrained browsers.
• Improved handling of files with non-standard extensions.
• Added ability to remove users from an account.

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One of the most common complaints we hear about the SAR process is having to review the same email over and over again. We previously tackled part of the problem with our duplicate detection and now we’re excited to announce a powerful new capability to our email triage workflow: Redundant Email Detection.

Redundant emails are those whose entire body content is already contained in another email within the same thread group. These are typically earlier messages in the thread that are included in the quoted section of later messages.

info This concept may be familiar to users in the ediscovery world, where it’s often called inclusivity. In that context, we now detect which emails are inclusive (contain the full thread or otherwise unique content) and which are non-inclusive (wholly duplicative).

This matters because the more emails you can exclude from your review as being duplicative or redundant, the less time you'll spend redacting and reviewing your DSAR. We typically find that for large cases, greater than 90% of the original files in the case can be excluded via duplicate detection, redundancy detection, or a rules-based exclusion leveraging our new advanced search.

To use the new feature, click on the new "Case Tasks" button in the case action menu:

Then, kick off a new redundant emails task:

Redundant emails will be given a "Redundant" status and will be automatically excluded.

We're excited to get feedback on how you use this feature and how we can make it better. Please let us know what you think!

Additional Improvements

• Added keyboard shortcuts to triage mode to make triaging even faster. Use return to mark in-scope and space to mark out-of-scope.
• Updated the language in the file deletion modal to make it less confusing.
• Resolved an issue that sometimes caused words with apostrophes to not be correctly surfaced in search results.
• Resolved an issue that caused redactions contained in other redactions to display overlapping exemption reasons.

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When triaging a large number of documents for relevance, one of the highest impact actions you can take is a rules-based approach to excluding files. We now support the ability to use boolean and other logical operators when constructing search queries, which greatly increases your ability to exclude files in bulk. For example, in the context of an employee DSAR you may want to start by excluding all files that do not contain known variations of the employee's name.

Table Filters

We've made a number of improvements to our table filters that make it easier to understand which filters are currently applied and ensure that you don't lose your table configuration when navigating between the table and individual documents.

• Filter design and experience is now consistent across all fields.
• Filters that are currently active now show in a different color and provide a preview of the active filter value.
• Filters are easier to remove by clicking the X button.
• Some less commonly used fields have been moved to a "More Filters" section, including the "Has Open Comments" filter and the "Show Duplcates" filter.
• The reviewer filter is now a multi-select field, allowing you to select multiple reviewers at once.
• Switching between the documents and emails tab will no longer reset the table filters.
• When navigating away and back to a table, you will land on the same page of results that you were previously on.

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We've upgraded our deduplication system to be smarter and more transparent. Deduplication is a powerful tool for speeding up document review. eDiscovery searches conducted in IT systems like Microsoft Purview often yield coarse, heavily duplicated results. This is particularly true for cases where multiple employee inboxes have been exported. Our deduplication system reduces this clutter and ensures that you only have to review a given file or email once.

You’ll now get clear indicators when a file is flagged as a duplicate, making it easier to understand what’s happening during processing. We'll also attempt to identify duplicates prior to upload, helping reduce storage use and avoid filling your case with unnecessary files.

Draft Exports (Beta)

You can now export a draft version of your case to make redaction review easier and more collaborative. Draft exports display your redactions as red outlines, clearly showing what’s been marked without actually removing the underlying content. Comments are also included, so reviewers can see the context behind each redaction decision.

This new export option is available on our redesigned Export page, currently in beta.

The new export page will be the future home of all case exports. It keeps a history of every export you generate, making it easy to refer back to earlier work and keep track of who has generated exports. It also includes enhanced export options, allowing you to do partial case exports based on document status.

Additional Improvements

• User selectors and dropdowns will now always display the logged-in user first.
• Made triage mode document transitions much smoother.
• Improved the performance and load time of redaction preview text in large documents.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused the in-app chat button to obscure the edit button in the policy exemption detail view.
• Fixed an issue that caused the sender filter options in the email list view to not update when applying other filters to the table.
• When applying filters to a table, we now automatically reset the page to page 1 so you do not end up looking at an empty page.
• Area redactions are now displayed in page thumbnails in the page deletion experiment.
• Ligatures like tt and ae that appear in the Calibri font (used for rendering email headers) are now selectable.

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It is common for entire pages of a document to be out-of-scope / exempt, but drawing a black box over an entire page can give the wrong impression. We’ve heard from many customers that they often go back through our case exports and manually delete pages where the entire page has been redacted.

To make this process easier, we are introducing a new experimental feature that allows you to remove pages from a document directly in the product. We’re excited to get feedback on how this helps streamline your workflows and reduce the need for post-processing. You’ll be able to select and delete pages in the file editor by clicking on the "Edit Document Pages" button in the toolbar.

tip To turn this feature on, click on your user avatar in the bottom left corner of the screen, then click "Experiments" and turn on "Delete Document Pages"

This feature is currently in beta, and we’re eager to learn how you use it—and what you’d like to see next. Let us know what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make page-level exclusions even better.

warning Deleted pages cannot be recovered at this time. Please be careful!

Financial Amount Detector

We now have the ability to detect financial amounts in documents and suggest them as potential redactions. This can be helpful if your documents contain sensitive financial performance or pricing information. This feature is currently available via opt-in. To have this detector added to your tenant, please send a quick note to support@phaselab.co or get in touch via the in-app chat.

Additional Improvements

• 100x performance improvement when working in larger (100+ page) documents.
• Added support for OCR in email attachments.
• Notifications can now be dismissed with a click and show a visual countdown before disappearing.
• Documents in triage mode can now be zoomed, a helpful addition when triaging large spreadsheets or images.
• Returning to the file list from a file will now open the appropriate file-type tab.
• Improved performance of next/previous document button for cases with 10k+ files.
• Fixed a bug in triage mode that would cause the second file in the list to briefly show a loading state.

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We're pleased to announce that OCR support is now available to all customers! OCR (short for Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that converts scanned documents, images, and PDFs containing text into machine-readable and searchable content.

With OCR enabled, your files become significantly more accessible and actionable – whether you're processing scans of old documents or screenshots of chat messages.

Images containing text will now be searchable, receive redaction suggestions and be included in case-wide redactions.

OCR is available by default across all plans, with no additional setup required. Simply upload your documents as usual, and we'll handle the rest in the background.

If you upload a file that contains text but the text isn't selectable, please let us know so we can investigate and further improve this feature.

Finalize Files in Bulk

Finalizing a file in the product generates the final redacted version of the document, adds that file to your case export, prevents any further changes to the file from actions like case-wide redactions, and generally signals that the work on this file is complete.

We intentionally designed the product to require that files be finalized one at a time to reinforce the role of finalization as a final review. However, in discussions with customers we've heard that for some workflows this approach doesn't make sense and simply creates unneccesary busywork.

To give you more flexibility in the finalization process, we've added the ability to finalize files in bulk. This leverages our existing bulk-action toolbar, so simply select the files that need to be finalized and hit the new Finalize button.

Use filters on fields like Status or Tags to help select large groups of files that need to be finalized.

Additional Improvements

• Resolved an issue that was causing the preview text of a selected redaction to be inconsistent with the actual text of the redaction.
• Improved the accuracy of case-wide redactions for multi-word text selections.
• Improved real-time conversation updates to our in-app chat.
• Fixed a layout issue that was causing user names/emails to overflow out of the navigation panel when in its expanded state.

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Many teams use comments to support redaction review and approval workflows, so we’ve made it easier to track which documents still need attention. You can now see the number of unresolved comments on each file at a glance, resolve threads to clean up the view while keeping the conversation history, and leave comments anywhere in a document – even on non-text files like images. These updates make it easier to stay on top of active conversations and streamline your review process.

In-App Chat Support

We’re excited to announce that in-app chat support is now live! Providing excellent support has always been a priority for us – many of you already know this firsthand through our shared Slack and Teams channels. This new feature expands that same real-time support experience directly into our product. No chat bots here friends, every message goes straight to a member of our team!

Other Improvements

• You can now filter the file list on files that do not have a tag. This is useful if you use tags for keeping track of workflow states and want to make sure that all files have been properly tagged.
• We've added the ability to update the status of a case directly from the case list by using the status dropdown.

Additional Fixes

• Case-wide redactions no longer match on partial words (aka substrings). Previously this behavior resulted in case-wide readactions of small words (often initials or short names) creating redactions in the middle of words that contained the same letter pattern.
• We now properly handle files that are uploaded with the application/vnd.ms-office MIME-type.
• In rare cases when downloading a finalization preview PDF, the default name of the file was incorrect. This has been fixed.

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You can now upload CSV files and have them automatically rendered as a data table. We've also added support for legacy and macro-enabled excel files that end in .xls and .xlsm.

Panning Tool

We've added a "grabber" or panning mode to the document viewer. This is particularly useful when working on a file with very large dimensions where you need to zoom in a bunch to work with the text.

Additional Fixes

• When viewing a document, the document is now the only scrollable element on the page. Previously there could be multiple scrollbars for different parts of the page, which made it annoying to navigate within the document.
• Occasionally certain words could not be selected when creating a comment or manual text redaction. Text selection should now be much more reliable and consistent.
• You can now exit area redaction mode by clicking on the area redaction button.
• Creating an area redaction while a document was open in multiple tabs would occasionally make the document fail to finalize. This has been fixed.
• When deleting a policy that is attached to a case you will now receive an error message explaining why you are unable to delete the policy.

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When using the "Select All" checkmark in the file list, you will now see an option to select ALL files in the case, not just the files on the current page of results. This functionality works with filters as well, allowing you to select and take bulk actions on all documents/emails in the case that match a certain filter criteria.

Case Status Updater

We've made it easier to update the status of a case. Simply click on the status badge while inside a case to select a new status.

Other Bug Fixes and improvements

• Comment notification emails now include the full text of the comment.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a document to jump to the first page after creating a new redaction.
• Fixed a bug that in rare cases could cause a document's text to be unselectable.

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When working on a large stack of documents or emails, it is important to be able to navigate quickly between files. We've made some improvements to how we handle document transitions to facilitate faster navigation between files in a stack.

When clicking the next/previous buttons, you can now rapidly click between files, previewing the titles without having to wait for the entire document to load. If you already know which file you're going to, you can now jump directly to a file by clicking on the number indicator and typing in the file number.

Go to Policy

This update also includes a small quality of life improvement to the document information panel, which displays various metadata about the current document and case. The policy name will now link you directly to the policy that is being used for the case... helpful if you need to quickly check the policy or make any changes.

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We've added a new column to our email and document file lists that displays the total number of pages of the PDF-rendered version of the file. This can be useful if you need find your largest files, or to quickly check the size of the file before clicking into it.

The pages column is hidden by default, but can easily be enabled by clicking on the table settings button in the top right corner of the file list.

In order to faciliate the growing number of columns in the list view, we've also moved our "needs triage" indicator to the left side of the file list to make it easier to scan the file triage status visually. We really appreciate the feedback from our users on this and always welcome ideas for how we can be improving the platform. Don't hesitate to reach out at help@phaselab.co if you have any questions or feedback.

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If you need to review and sanitize screenshots or other type of images, you can now upload these directly into Phaselab without having to convert them to PDF first. We currently support the following image types: png, jpg, jpeg, jp2, tif, tiff.

Note that we are not yet applying any OCR to the images, so text contained within uploaded images will not be searchable, selectable or contain redaction suggestions. We're working on rolling out OCR in the near future!

Due Dates

We've added an optional due date field to the case creation page. This allows you to set a specific date that the case is due. As the due date approaches, an indicator will appear reminding you that the case is due soon. You can update the due date at any time on the case settings page.

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Occasionally, new users aren't able to receive their invite emails due to corporate email filters. Admins can now copy a user's unique invitation link from the member management page. This link can then be shared with the user directly so they can complete the signup process.

Resend Invitations

Our invitations expire 7 days after being sent. If a user didn't sign up within this time, you can now resend the invitation with one click from the member management page.

Other Improvements

Improved File Navigation

We made navigating from one file to another much faster and now display which filters and sorts you currently have applied when navigating across a stack of files.

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