In responding to a legal request for electronic communications, this is generally a request for email relating to a particular topic. In a "self-collection" process, each custodian is requested to review their own documents and communications to produce "responsive" documents. Responsive documents are those which match the subject and topic requirements as determined by the legal request.
At LBL, users of the Google mail infrastructure can take advantage of Google's mail "labels" and their audit API to allow easy collection of tagged email communications. The custodian simply labels all messages which are responsive.Then Legal and IT can pull down exactly those tagged emails from each custodian via Google's audit API. These messages can then be futher screened by legal and presented as legally required.
How to Label One Message
Legal will provide a specific label to use for tagging responsive email messages. This label will be unique to the specific case, for example: "thiscase_collect" or "case20120822-01".
You can label a message from the main inbox page of Gmail, or when reading an individual message thread in Gmail's Conversation View.
From the main inbox page, you can simply select the checkbox next to a message. Once you have selected the message, click on the "tag" icon (circled in red).
You can then create a new label.
We will use this same label to identify all responsive mail communications. You only have to create it once.
This message conversation will now show the label next to the subject.
You can now search by this label, or review only messages with this label by navigating it to in left navigation tag list.
Labeling MANY Messages
If you are searching through you mail and have MANY responsive messages, it can be very time consuming to select messages one at a time. The solution is to find a search string that matches MOST or ALL of the responsive emails. After you enter in your search criteria and hit return, you should have a good idea from the first 20 matching message whether this is a good match. You can refine your search string if you need to, but if there are one or two exceptions, it is easiest to clear them up AFTER you label all of these matches.
To label all of these messages, click the TOP checkbox. This will select all of the message on this page.
Note that you will see text and a link that offers to select ALL MATCHING messages in your mailbox, not just the 20 that you can see one your screen. Go ahead and click that link.
Now you can go back and use the label button as you did before when you were labeling ONE message, but you will actually label ALL messages that were matched by your search. For example, say you search for all messages containing the word "Mountain" and want to label them with the tag "thiscase_collect". You clicked the top checkbox, and then you clicked "select all messages that match this search". Clicking the label button you can then type in that label, make click that label checkbox, then click Apply.
You will know this is going to apply to ALL matching messages, because Gmail will ask for a confirmation:
You can confirm the messages you have labeled afterwards by clicking on the label name on the rightside Gmail navigation bar which lists all your labels, or you can type the label in the search bar as shown:
Culling Unresponsive Messages After Labeling
If you need to UNLABEL messages after you have added many messages, say from a a big search that was too generous, it is easiest to do that from the label view. Simply select the collection label that you created from the list of tags on the right side of the google message window. OR, search for that label in the Gmail search window by entering "label: thiscase_collect" (using the appropriate label). You can then quickly scan through all unresponsive messages and unselect ONLY those messages, as shown:
