Characters: Enhanced Witness Management

With the Opus 2 7.0 release, we are pleased to introduce the new Characters feature, which enhances the platform's witness management capabilities. Analyze and organize case information with greater flexibility to derive smarter insights and enjoy access to new ways of manipulating and organizing data.

Overview 

With Characters, you’ll be able to:

  • Create a centralized view of witnesses and key persons relevant to the case, along with related information and documents;
  • Prepare witness binders in less time. With your data in one location, you can find data and export with ease;
  • Quickly and easily capture and review relationships between your witness and key evidence with multi-directional linking;
  • Tailor the Characters feature to suit your individual cases. Add, remove and modify any information field and customize the layout exactly how you want it; and
  • Use advanced views such as worksheets and cards that offer different lenses to view your case information. We’ll be adding more views in future releases to provide even greater flexibility.

For a full demonstration on how to use this tool, please contact your Opus 2 Client Success Manager.


 

 

Enable the Characters tab on your Workspace (Admin Users)

If the Characters tab is not enabled on your workspace, a Workspace Admin or System Admin user will need to turn on the feature from the Admin > Settings page by checking the box next to Show Characters Tab. Please note that ALL workspaces created on Opus 2 7.0 onwards will have the Characters tab enabled by default.

 

If you do not have the access to do this or would like further information, please contact your firm's Workspace or System Administrator(s), or email support-us@opus2.com.


Getting Started: Worksheets & Entities

Once you have access to the Characters tab, you're ready to start populating the worksheet with entities. Your worksheet will function as a spreadsheet for your witness data, and each entity corresponds to one character.  To populate information for each entity, you can manually fill in each field or import in the data for multiple entities using a CSV import file.

Create A New Entity

Each entity in a worksheet represents a person relevant to the case.

To create a New Entity, click on the purple Add button next to the Worksheet name. 

Type in the corresponding details for each field in the Create New Entity dialog. Hit Apply when finished.

This adds a new Entity to your worksheet. 

 

 

Managing Your Worksheet

Please note that some options may not be available for non-Administrator users. If you need access to a specific option that is not currently available to you, please contact your Workspace or System Administrator, or Opus 2 Support.

Select Columns for Viewing

Customize your view of the fields that contain data for your witness using the View drop-down. Click the Columns button, then check the boxes corresponding to the column names you'd like displayed within your worksheet:

 

Edit Your Worksheet

The Edit button allows you to change the settings for your worksheet, card view and display.

 

Make changes to your worksheet settings and defaults in the Edit Worksheet dialog. Hit Apply to implement changes.

Customize Card View Layout

Customize your Card View layout by dragging and dropping fields from the list on the left-hand side onto the layout template in the center. Move the fields up or down in your desired order and set the position for the label to be on the left, top or none.

 

 

Export Your Worksheet

Export your worksheet into either a CSV- or XLSX-format report using the Export button: