Technical FAQs

Question

How can I make significant changes to the UI of a PrizmDoc sample?

Answer

While jQuery can be used to make some small changes to the samples UI, it does not always make sense to make your changes programmatically on the front-end.

In this case, you will want to make your UI changes to the HTML templates used to compile the template that is passed in during viewer initialization.

To make changes and recompile the templates, you can utilize the following GitHub repository:

https://github.com/Accusoft/prizmdoc-viewer

Question

Why am I receiving a 500 error when making a Viewing Session PUT request?

Answer

This issue can occur if you forget to prefix the {viewingSessionId} portion of the URL with u, or if you simply request an invalid {viewingSessionId} in the call.

For example, the PUT call should look like the following:

PUT /ViewingSession/u{viewingSessionId}/SourceFile

For more information on syntax and other API calls related to Viewing sessions, please see:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#pas-viewing-sessions.html

 

legal technology

Access to justice is a problem. As stated by the Honorable Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack in a recent “Reimagining Legal Technology” panel discussion, “8 out of 10 people with civil legal problems can’t afford lawyers.” However, self-service solutions for consumers and productivity applications for litigators could improve outcomes for all parties. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is driving transformation in the legal space as those in the field seek out remote opportunities to keep legal proceedings moving forward. As a result, new remote capabilities have helped to further the conversation around access and a digital-first approach to legal processes, including the storage, review, and delivery of evidence and other supporting case information.


Shifting Mindsets in The Legal Field

An interesting insight offered by Gary Sangha, a serial legal technology company founder, is that technology produced exclusively for the legal market is several years behind the innovation found in other markets. 

This is profound for a few reasons. While it certainly suggests that some areas of the profession are slow to adopt new technology, it could also suggest to software developers that failing to provide cutting-edge capabilities for legal professionals could cause litigators to look elsewhere when selecting new technology upgrades—which are being budgeted for right now as courts and law offices strive to find better ways to serve their clients in a digital-first environment. 

Also interesting is that when you investigate the marketplace for inspiration, you can find a wealth of features with cross-application potential. Serving a market that has been traditionally slower to adopt cutting-edge, purpose-built legal solutions isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to product development because there’s so much inspiration to draw from other markets.  


Technologies Transforming the Legal Space

Legal technologies gaining steam include artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language markup. This represents a giant shift in the way legal professionals work. While lawyers did very individual, competitive work in law school previously, many of the leaders of legal institutions, like Chief Justice McCormack, are trying to shift this mindset to more collaborative work.

The value of legal work used to be in knowing where to find key information. To remain competitive while improving access for those seeking legal services, litigators must move to a team-oriented approach to case making. Systems exist to automate much of the information storage and retrieval process. Therefore, the true value is no longer in being able to find key information, but rather curating the information in such a way as to create solid cases for clients. 

However, without information storing, gathering, and processing software in place, litigators may spend as much time searching for information as they do building cases. That’s why software application developers need to consider advancing the core capabilities of their solutions to include vital legal functionality that automates key elements of The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), which includes: 

  • Identification 
  • Preservation 
  • Collection 
  • Processing
  • Review
  • Analysis 
  • Production 
  • Presentation 

One top law firm reported experiencing a 70% increase in phishing attempts since the pandemic began, and as Law.com points out, “IT Managers have gone from managing 400 people in one office to having 400 single-person offices.” This can easily create quite a security crisis as resources are spread thinner than ever before. Without tools to drive accountability to data governance best practices, the odds of one of those hundreds of phishing attempts successfully breaking through significantly improves. 

Umbrella technologies covering most of these processes include cybersecurity and information governance solutions that protect access to critical information while equipping essential personnel to safely and collaboratively markup, redact, and process sensitive data. 


Ramping Up to Meet Emerging Demands

Though litigators have been slow to adopt emerging technologies in the past, COVID-19 is driving fast transformation in this space. The push to digital-first formats is a tremendous growth opportunity for application developers that stand ready to deliver the functionality required to facilitate due process via secure collaboration capabilities that include:

  • Annotation 
  • Redaction
  • Full text search
  • Support and aggregation capabilities for hundreds of file formats
  • Digital Rights Management (DRM)
  • The added security of digital watermarking and 256-bit AES encryption 

If building all these features from the ground up sounds like too much for your already-busy team of developers, then consider partnering with a trusted third-party like Accusoft. When you need to add key functionality quickly in order to meet a legal client’s needs before their budget expires, we can be your competitive advantage. Application developers partner with us for in-demand, brandless features for the legal field because we help them launch a fully supported feature in just weeks instead of months or years. To learn more about Accusoft legal application features, discover our capabilities in our eGuide, Finding Common Ground.

Question

I am a PrizmDoc Cloud customer and need to do content conversion with PrizmDoc. Do I have to do anything special to make it work?

Answer

Yes, in order to do content conversion as a PrizmDoc Cloud customer, there are a few things you need to do:

  1. Most of the information regarding how to use our content conversion service can be found here, including the requests that can be made to it.
  2. The URL the requests need to go to is api.accusoft.com, so you will need to make sure the requests for content conversion are going there.
  3. You also need to add a header to the requests as follows: acs-api-key: yourapikey.

Doing these three things will allow you to use content conversion as a PrizmDoc Cloud customer.

Question

When doing a text search in a document in PrizmDoc, the highlight color for the search results is a light blue background. Is there a way to change the highlight color for search results in the PrizmDoc Viewer?

Answer

You can change the highlight color specifically in the PrizmDoc Viewer file viewer.js file located in the viewer-assets\js folder of your project/application.

You will need to locate 2 instances of the search term “highlightColor: undefined” in the code block below located close to line 4400. The actual line number will vary depending on the version of viewer.js you are using. You can replace “undefined” with a hexadecimal color value which you can look up from the following site: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/

// This is a request for a new searchQuery triggered by the search input field.
// Generate new search terms, and save them globally.
prevMatchingOptions = _.clone(matchingOptions);

if (matchingOptions.exactPhrase) {
    // We need to match the exact string, as is
    if (queryString.length) {
        searchTerms.push({
            searchTerm: queryString,
            highlightColor: undefined,
            searchTermIsRegex: false,
            contextPadding: 25,
            matchingOptions: matchingOptions
        });
    }
} else {
    // Split up multiple words in the string into separate search term objects
    var queryArr = queryString.split(' ');
    queryArr = _.unique(queryArr);
    _.forEach(queryArr, function(query){
        if (query.length) {
            searchTerms.push({
                searchTerm: query,
                highlightColor: undefined,
                searchTermIsRegex: false,
                contextPadding: 25,
                matchingOptions: matchingOptions
            });
        }
    });
}         
Question

Why does my markupBurner call with XML data get an InvalidJson error?

Answer

The MarkupBurner accepts two types of payloads, XML and JSON.

When making a call to the markup burner with either type, you have to specify what kind of payload you are sending by specifying a Content-Type header.

For more information on MarkupBurners, see here:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#pas-markup-burners.html

Question

PAS appears to be unable to retrieve my document. What could be the issue?

Answer

If PAS is trying to retrieve documents from a source with a bad SSL certificate or a self-signed certificate and it is not configured to allow bad SSL certificates, it will fail to retrieve the document and log a generic 580 error.

For more information about Viewing Session creation parameters, including acceptBadSslCertificate see here:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#pas-viewing-sessions.html

Question

In the PrizmDoc Viewer, what are the two different ways to load annotation layers?

Answer

PrizmDoc has two options for loading annotations, the “My Annotations” pane and the “Annotations for Review” pane.

The “My Annotations” pane is used to load a single annotation layer for editing. You can add, delete, or make changes to annotations and then save those changes using the “My Annotations” pane.

The “Annotations for Review” pane is used for viewing annotations. You can load as many annotation layers for viewing as you would like. You cannot interact with annotations loaded in this way, but you are able to make comments on them. You can toggle between any of these layers to hide them. You can also merge these annotations to the currently loaded annotation layer from “My Annotations”.

For more information see our documentation here: https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/Annotation_Layers.html

Question

When I try to install PrizmDoc Server on Windows, my username/password are rejected as incorrect. How can I troubleshoot this?

Answer

It’s possible that there is some problem with the account you’re trying to log in under.

First, make sure the server is in the same domain as the username you login with. For example, if you are logging in under abc.com\flastname, ensure that your server is also a part of the abc.com domain.

Second, do a “whoami” from the command prompt – verify the id that comes up is in the local admins group (Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Local Users and Groups -> Groups -> Administrators). You need to be a local admin in order to install the product.

Third, if none of the above work, you can type the password into Notepad and copy from Notepad into the installer. Sometimes the installer has difficulties with text copied directly from web browsers. Copying from Notepad resolves this issue.

If none of the above work, then as a workaround, try creating a new local account: (Settings App -> Accounts -> Other People -> “Add someone else…” -> “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information” -> “Add a user without a Microsoft account”) You can then enter the new credentials you just created into the PrizmDoc installer. Once the services are running, you can change the login information back to the desired administrator account (Services -> Prizm (Double click) -> Log on -> This account). You’ll want to repeat this for all three services (Prizm, Prizm Application Services, and PrizmDemo).

Question

Is there a way to modify the colors used in PrizmDoc Viewer’s search results? In particular, the currently selected search result has a very similar color to the other results from the same term. Is there a way to increase the contrast?

Answer

Currently, we don’t support the ability to set anything other than the highlight color through the search API.

There is a feature request to enable such modifications:

https://ideas.accusoft.com/ideas/PDV-I-531

Question

What does it mean when I see “Email Address is not Registered” when entering in an email in the Evaluation Dialog?

Answer

You will see this error if you have not registered on the Accusoft website.

To register your email address, please visit the following link below:

https://my.accusoft.com/Account/FirstTimeUser?Length=7