Cataloging files and folders

Litigators often receive  multiple digital files that need to be reviewed.  They can often be spread over different media, and lawyers need to develop procedures for organising, indexing and reviewing such material.

There are many commercial "document" management systems which can help.  My own personal preference is CaseMap, but there are many others.  I have also written a custom MS Excel macro that helps me to catalog the contents of a directory and potentially navigate its contents and makes notes in the spreadsheet.  I generally use it to catalog a directory's contents and then use this as an index which can be imported in to CaseMap.

You can download the spreadsheet from here (note that this will not work on a MAC).

If you are using MS Excel 2007 or higher, you will find a custom "Robobrief" menu on the Add-ins menu of the ribbon.

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For older versions, it appears on the main menu bar.

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Run the command Robobrief > Catalog Folder and you'll see that a new workbook is created and that the contents of a folder that you are prompted to select is indexed.

You are also given the option to choose whether subfolders should be included. Once the process is complete, you'll be able to open each file by clicking on the "Open" hyperlink.

The full file path for each entry is included in the spreadsheet so if you want to import the list in to your own document management system just save the worksheet as a text file and then run the relevant import routine.

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