Legal and eDiscovery teams
Discovery is not only documents. Matters arrive with transaction exports, call records, payroll and account data, often as CSVs far too large for Excel. BigXL opens those files at any size, cleans and merges them without a formula, and can add Bates numbering and mask protected categories before you produce. Nothing is uploaded at any point.
The part of discovery that lives in spreadsheets
Opposing counsel sends a three gigabyte transaction export. The client’s finance team produces four quarters in four different layouts. A carrier returns call records with numbers already mangled into scientific notation by whatever touched them last.
None of that is document review, and none of it fits in Excel. It is the work that has to happen before anyone can review anything, and it is what BigXL is for.
Open it
CSV, TSV, compressed .gz and .zst, Parquet, and Excel workbooks, at any
size, with no row limit. The file streams from disk, so you are scrolling it
while it is still indexing. Opening, sorting, filtering and pivoting cost
nothing.
Clean it
Productions arrive inconsistent. The Pro cleaning tools deal with the usual damage without a formula: long account numbers and IDs kept as text rather than collapsed into scientific notation, mixed date formats standardised to one pattern with ambiguous dates refused rather than guessed, currency columns stripped of symbols and bracket negatives, and stray text in numeric columns grouped so you decide what happens to each value.
Merge it
Combining productions by copy and paste is where quiet errors come from. If one file has its columns in a different order, values land in the wrong column and nothing warns you. BigXL merges on the header name, keeps columns that appear in only some files, and shows you what it will do before writing anything.
Preparing something to go out
Before a file leaves the engagement, the Enterprise tier can add Bates numbering and mask protected categories. The Legal preset looks for the categories that commonly matter in civil discovery, including attorney-client communications, work product, settlement records, Social Security and tax identifiers, minors’ names, and financial account numbers. Detection validates the actual cell values rather than trusting column names, and it can write a privilege log recording what was masked and on what stated basis.
Masking is non-destructive. Your source file is never altered, and any mask can be undone from the timeline unless your organisation has set the policy to make them irrevocable.
What BigXL does not claim
Detection is a checklist for a human decision, not a clearance. BigXL does not warrant that it finds every piece of protected data in every file, and deciding whether something is safe to produce stays with you and your counsel. BigXL can generate a certificate recording the transformations applied, with SHA-256 hashes of the source and exported files. Treat it as BigXL’s own record of what happened. It is not an official certification and it makes no determination about admissibility or compliance.
Common questions
Is BigXL an eDiscovery platform?
No, and it is not trying to be. Dedicated eDiscovery platforms handle email, documents, images and the full review workflow, and they do far more than BigXL does. BigXL covers the structured data side of a matter, the spreadsheets and exports that are too big or too messy to open, and it does that part without the data leaving your machine.
Can BigXL apply Bates numbering to a data set?
Yes. It adds a sequential Bates_No column at the front of the data, with a prefix you choose, a starting number, a digit count and an optional suffix. The numbers are zero-padded, so PROD_00000001 onwards, and you see a preview against your real data before it is applied. This is an Enterprise feature.
Can I document what was withheld and why?
The Legal preset can export a privilege log as a CSV alongside the redacted file, recording what was masked, which columns were affected, and the stated basis for each redaction. What that log is used for, and whether it satisfies your obligations, remains your and your counsel's judgment.
Does anything leave the machine?
No file data leaves the machine. BigXL works on an air-gapped workstation; its optional update check sends only the signed licence key. Bix (the plain English assistant) and the query engine both run on your own CPU.