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Electronic Discovery Services

Email & Outlook PST e-Discovery
Convert Email & Attachments to Searchable PDF for Litigation Review

Lexbe offers Outlook PDF+, a premium service to help companies, litigators and staff find responsive emails from Outlook PST files, in connection with e-Discovery requests and related legal analysis.  This comprehensive service converts emails from Outlook PST files to searchable, logically named PDFs, including attachments.

Below you can find details on Outlook PDF+, including why it is needed, the key benefits and features, sample files converted from Outlook (or MSGs) to PDF, additional information and price quotes for the service, our low price guarantee, how to get started, and information about our industry partner program.  If you have any questions, feel free to call (800-401-7809 x22) or email us at   

Need for Effective Email Conversion Tools in e-Discovery

Email has become the most important source of evidence in litigation and legal matters, and is the primary reason for the rapid growth of e-Discovery.  Case outcomes increasingly turn on the contemporaneous statements and admissions that are so often expressed and recorded in email. 

But email discovery can be particularly difficult to prepare for legal production and analysis, as emails are usually found natively in compound Outlook PST and OST files that hold email, attachments and metadata.  With these files it can be difficult to search, analyze and separate the potentially relevant email from the non-responsive.

Lawyers and litigation support professionals often prefer to work with files in the ubiquitous PDF format, to allow for easy review, search and Bates stamping.  But existing tools and services have shortcomings when converting Outlook PST email to PDF, including the following:

Problems with Converting Emails to PDF with Other Methods
  • Attachments not converted to PDF, but only linked to PDF emails (attachments remain in native format).
  • Attachments not converted to PDF, but embedded within PDF emails (Acrobat 8 and 9).
  • Attachments not searchable.
  • Attachments not joined to email in single PDF file.
  • Recursive attachments makes other conversion methods highly impracticable (e.g., emails within emails within Zip files, etc.)
  • Email and attachments not named with date, sender, receiver, subject, etc. to allows for easy identification and sort for legal analysis.
  • Page-level Bates stamping of all attachments is not possible.

These problems make it difficult to work efficiently with PDFs converted form email.  For these reasons, Lexbe developed the Outlook PDF+ service described below.

Key Benefits & Features of Outlook PDF+ Service

The Outlook+ PDF service converts email messages from an Outlook PST into searchable PDFs, with attachments extracted and joined if desired.  Attachments are extracted even if in ZIP compressed files.  Also the PDF files are named with metadata from the email: date, sender, receiver and subject, or Bates numbers, as requested,

Outlook PDF+

  • Each email is converted to searchable PDF
  • Email attachments extracted and converted to searchable PDF (including zipped files)
  • Each email and its attachments are joined into one file, beginning with the email and with the attachments in order
  • The combined file is named with metadata from the email in the following format:  DATE TIME SENDER, EMAIL SUBJECT
  • for example, a combined email might be named:  2008-02-15 08.15.54AM Jane Doe  Proposal for purchase .pdf
  • Bates numbers are printed on the bottom of pages on request

Alphanumeric Listing of Email and Attachments

  • Once converted email and attachments can be viewed together as part of an alphanumeric sort, such as on an office LAN.
  • Example:
    2008-02-15 08.15.54AM Jane Doe ATT 1 Carol Smith, Letter of Intent.pdf
    2008-02-15 08.15.54AM Jane Doe ATT 2 Carol Smith, Confidentiality Agreements.pdf
    2008-02-15 08.15.54AM Jane Doe ATT 3 Carol Smith, Key Employee Questionnaire.pdf
    2008-02-15 08.15.54AM Jane Doe COMB Carol Smith, Proposal for purchase.pdf
    2008-02-15 08.15.54AM Jane Doe EMAIL Carol Smith, Proposal for purchase.pdf

Return of PDF Files
Converted PDF files can be returned by CD or DVD, by secure FTP transfer, or through free upload to our web-based Litigation Document Management and Review application.  This last option includes the ability to organize, search, review, and conduct productions of the converted emails for free for 30 days as part of a legal matter. 

Other Email File Types
The Outlook PST+ conversion service can also work with other email file types, including Outlook Express DBX files, Lotus Notes NFS files, and others for an additional conversion charge.  Call for details.  

Sample Email Files Converted from PST to PDF

Here is a sample of how the Outlook PDF+ service works with a sample MSG file (saved out from a an Outlook PST file).  Click on the links below to open the original email and the converted PDF files to see how it works.

Original Email (in MSG format after extraction from PST)

Outlook PDF+:
2008-11-25 03.53.11PM COMB_6 Susan Cooper, Bill Robertson, Chipper case files2.pdf

Additional Information and Price Quotes

Additional information and a price quote is available here, or feel free to call (800-401-7809 x22) or email us at  . We offer per GB discount pricing on all jobs to provide customers with pricing predictability.

 Low Price Guarantee
We feel so confident about the operating efficiencies of our proprietary electronic document stored image (ESI) processing architecture and the value of our eDiscovery services, that we can offer a low-price guarantee.  more    

Getting Started
You send us entire PST and OST files that you wish for us to process.  You can FedEx CDs, DVDs or portable drives to us.  Or upload the files directly to our secure FTP server for quicker service.  

Partner Program
If you are a litigation support provider or litigation consultant and would like to offer this service to clients, please contact us about our partner programs at (800-401-7809 x22) or email us at 

All services described on this and related pages are subject to Lexbe's Digitization Services Agreement.