Use the AND NOT connector to find documents in which a search word or phrase is to be excluded. For example, the following search finds documents where the word "trust" occurs but the word "charitable" does not.

trust AND NOT charitable

Because the exclusion covers the entire document, a document would be excluded if the word "charitable" appears anywhere in the document. Therefore, even if "charitable" is used as a term of distinction in a document, the document would not be included in the search results. For example, a document that includes the phrase "this is not a charitable trust" would not returned, even though that is the type of trust you want information about.

Using AND NOT with field searches

When documents have information in some consistent part or field, you may use AND NOT with less risk. For example, if you want to find court cases that mention asbestos, but do not have the Manville Corporation as a plaintiff or defendant, you may place the AND NOT connector at the end of your search, as in the following example:

AND NOT name (manville)

This restricts the operation of AND NOT to the NAME field. If you do not use a field search, but instead end your search with

AND NOT manville

you eliminate undesired cases, but you also eliminate any cases that mention the word "manville," even as a reference, and any case that used the word "manville" unrelated to the Manville Corporation.

Putting AND NOT last

If you include AND NOT in your search, it should be the last connector you use. Otherwise it may produce undesired results.

AND NOT name (manville)

If you put another search word after that part of your search, such as:

AND NOT name (manville) AND bhopal

you would not eliminate all documents with "manville" in the NAME field. In fact, you might not eliminate any. By linking "bhopal" to NAME (manville) with the AND connector, only documents that have both "manville" in the NAME field and the word "bhopal" somewhere in the text would be eliminated.