Key Terms: How Phaselaw Uses Them

In this article: A quick reference guide to the key terms you'll come across in Phaselaw, explained in the order you're likely to encounter them.

Case

In Phaselaw, a case represents a single disclosure request. All of your documents, decisions, redactions, and exports for that request live inside the case. Each case has a unique ID which you can share with the Phaselaw support team if you ever need help.

Cases move through a set of statuses as work progresses: New → Verification → Document Search → Document Review → Final Approval → Closed.

Policy

A policy is a set of rules that defines how you want to process a case - including the legislation governing your redactions (for example, UK GDPR) and any associated deadlines or exemptions. You can create as many policies as you need, and when you create a case you simply select which policy applies.

Triage

Triage in Phaselaw is your first pass through a document set - making fast, high-level scoping decisions before detailed review begins. Phaselaw's triage tools are designed for speed, letting you quickly rule documents in or out without opening each one individually. On large cases, triage is where you'll save the most time.

In Scope / Out of Scope

When you upload documents into a case, everything is in scope by default - meaning it will be included in the final disclosure unless you decide otherwise. As you review, you can mark individual documents as out of scope if they aren't relevant to the request - for example, documents that don't relate to the data subject at all.

Out of scope documents are excluded from the final export but remain in the case. If your policy has Require Exemption Reasons enabled, every out of scope decision will be logged with a reason- giving you a clear audit trail.

Duplicate / Redundant

Phaselaw automatically identifies two types of repeated content so you never have to review the same material twice:

• Duplicates are exact copies of a file. Only one copy is surfaced for review

• Redundant documents apply to emails specifically. If an earlier email in a thread is fully quoted in a later reply, Phaselaw can identify it as redundant and flag it automatically- but this requires you to run the redundancy analysis task from within your case.

Both are recorded in the case summary export.

Near Duplicate

Near-Duplicate Detection (Experimental) identifies files that have identical or near-identical content but slight differences in metadata- for example, the same document saved with a different filename, or the same email with a minor header difference. Unlike standard deduplication (which catches exact copies) or redundancy analysis (which applies to email threads), near-duplicate detection is designed for loose files and unthreaded emails that would otherwise slip through. This feature is currently in beta- opt in from the Experiments menu to try it:

Suggestion

When you open a document, Phaselaw's AI will have already scanned it and flagged content for redaction. Each flag is called a suggestion.  Our models recognizes commonly redacted personal data. We’ll flag names, emails, addresses, and more reducing your workload instantly.

You review each suggestion and either redact or keep it. Suggestions are a starting point - you remain in full control of every decision.

Redaction

Redactions can be applied to a single selection, across an entire document, or across the whole case in one action. A single approved redaction can be applied across all relevant files, reducing human error and doing in seconds what used to take days.

In your policy configuration, you can choose to require an exemption reason for every redaction. You can also choose to display the exemption reason directly within the redaction box in your finalised document.

Exemption

Exemptions can be logged against each redaction and displayed directly on the redaction box in the finalised document. How exemptions are configured will depend on your policy settings.

To speed up repetitive redaction work, you can set a default exemption for a case. This is applied automatically to every redaction unless you manually override it - useful when the vast majority of your redactions share the same justification, e.g. 3rd party personal data

Tag

Tags are freeform labels you can apply to documents to organise your case your way. They're particularly useful for filtering the document list during review, or for targeting a specific group of documents at export - note that filtering by tag at export is currently only available for draft exports.

What's next?

1. Ready to create your first case? → How to Create a New Case

2. Want to see the interface first? → A Tour of the Phaselaw Interface