In legal settings, designations are specialized identifications, by page and line number, of any important testimony that one party intends to introduce into evidence at trial. Often these designation records are exchanged between the parties of a case.

CaseFleet's designations add-on feature provides the ability to create and edit designations and their related comments within the deposition reviewer. In addition, you can import designations via a CSV from another party, and export your own designated passages for sharing.

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The designations feature resides solely in the latest version of the deposition reviewer. To request the deposition designations feature be enabled on your account, contact our Customer Success team via the in-app chat or by emailing support@casefleet.com.

When designations are present in a deposition transcript, there will be a colored bar on the left margin of the transcript beside the lines that have been identified in the designation. These bars are color-coded, with blue indicating designations created by a user on the account and orange indicating imported designations received from another party.

When you click on a designation, the “Edit Designation” form will appear on the left, providing details about the designation, such as the start and end location (page and line number), any issue tags you want to include, as well as a memo field for adding any relevant notes.

You can show or hide a list of all designations in the deposition by clicking the "Designations" button in the toolbar and selecting “Show sidebar” or “Hide sidebar” from the drop-down:

The designations list lets you easily review designated content as you scroll through the document. Each designation “card” includes the page and line numbers for the designated content along with any memos or issue tags included and indicates if the designation is an external import.

To quickly jump to the location of a particular designation, simply click the card in the list. This will automatically navigate to the appropriate destination in the document, as well as open up the designations form, so any further details can be viewed or edited.

There are three ways to add designations in CaseFleet:

The easiest method to create a new designation is by selecting the relevant line numbers in the designations strip to the left of the transcript text. Using your mouse, click the "+" icon in the designations region and drag to include the full passage to autofill the designations form. Add any additional relevant information, and click "Save" to create the designation.

You can also create designations by highlighting text. Once the text is highlighted, the“Create New Fact” form will appear on the left. At the top, select the drop-down next to the “Link to existing fact” option and select “Create designation”:

On the “Create Designation” form that appears, the page and line locations will be automatically captured based on your highlighted text. Add any additional relevant information, and click "Save" to create the designation.

Designations can also be created manually via the designations button in the toolbar. Click the “Designations” drop-down and select the “Create new designation” option. This will open the “Create Designation” form on the left, but will not autofill any information. Page and line numbers for the designation must be manually added when using this method.

To edit an existing designation, click on the colored designation bar or the appropriate card in the designations sidebar to open the Edit Designation form. Don't forget to save any edits made by clicking the orange "Save" button after making changes.

The designations feature also allows you to import designations provided by another party. To do so, open the appropriate deposition transcript in CaseFleet’s document reviewer and select the “Upload designations” option from the drop-down:

A form will appear with an upload field, as well as further details regarding the required format of the import file. Namely, the file should be prepared in CSV format using Microsoft Excel, and include a row of headers indicating the following for each designation: from_page; from_line; to_page; to_line; memo; and issues.

Upon uploading the import file, the form will update with a preview of the designations to be imported and will display warnings for any found errors. If additional columns are included in the file, they will be disregarded:

Review the import list and click the orange “Save x designations” button at the bottom of the modal, or click the Cancel button to exit the modal without importing.

Imported designations will display in orange to indicate that these were provided by another party.

To export all designations for a particular deposition file, select “Download designations” from the Designations drop-down in the toolbar.

A file will be downloaded, providing the designation location and associated issues or memos, as well as a column with the header “created by us”. The true/false values in this column indicate if the designation was created by a member of your team (TRUE) or if it came from an external import (FALSE).