Page-Level PDF Review and Search Results

[markkerzner]

Problem

Currently, document-level review returns the entire document in search results, even when only a single page is relevant to the search term. This creates inefficiency during review, especially for large PDFs where reviewers must manually locate the relevant page within the document.

Historically, reviewers solved this by preprocessing PDFs with external PDF splitter tools before ingestion, producing page-level PDFs that could then be indexed individually in the eDiscovery platform.

Proposed Enhancement

Add support for page-level PDF review and indexing within FreeEedUI.

Short-Term UI Improvement

• Enhance the preview pane (right side of the screen) to support easier navigation within long documents.
• Use a scrollable preview experience to allow reviewers to quickly move through document pages without opening the full document externally.

Long-Term Feature

Add an ingestion option to automatically split PDFs into page-level documents during processing.

Expected Behavior

• Each PDF page becomes an individually indexed/searchable unit.
• Search results return the specific page relevant to the query instead of the entire document.
• Tags, notes, coding decisions, and review actions can be applied at the page level.
• Reviewers can navigate directly to the relevant page from search results.

Benefits

• Higher quality and more precise review workflows.
• Faster reviewer navigation and issue spotting.
• Better tagging granularity.
• Improved usability for large productions and evidence sets.
• More consistent with advanced Early Case Assessment (ECA) workflows.

Considerations

• Preserve linkage between page-level documents and the parent source document.
• Maintain document metadata and Bates numbering relationships.
• Consider optional ingestion modes:
  • Standard document-level ingestion
  • Page-level ingestion
• Evaluate storage and indexing impact for large datasets.