Coding contracts

Coding refers to capturing and storing metadata about a contract or its clauses. You can code a contract by clicking into fields, from send-to-field, or via data point suggestions.

Relativity is flexible in creating custom fields with varying format options, so the sky is the limit in terms of the type of data you can extract. Examples of use cases include extracting a lease's renewal date, or determining the risk level of a change-in-control provision from an employment agreement.

Supported field types:

Fixed Length
Long Text
Date
Whole Number
Decimal
Currency
Yes/No
Single Choice
Multi Choice
Single Object
Multiple Object

Unsupported field types:

File
User

Coding by clicking into fields

In the Contracts Viewer, you can code contracts by clicking into fields. Contracts organizes fields by field type.

For all field types populated with any value, hovering over the field will show an X button to the right of the field for clearing out the value.
All drop-downs support dynamic searching to find choices.
If you select a child field in a nested list, Contracts will automatically select all its parent fields as well.

For information on field types in Relativity, see Fields.

Field types and their coding limitations

Field	Coding limitations
Fixed-Length Long Text	You can configure fixed-length text fields with length up to 4,999 characters and long text fields can exceed this. The technical limitation of a long text field is 2 GB. If you try to code a text field and you exceed these limitations, you'll receive an error.
Date	After selecting a date using the date picker, it will always display in the format of "March 14, 2011." When you save, Contracts store it in a format friendly to your SQL server's regional settings.
Currency Whole Number Decimal	Enter a whole number or decimal number.
Yes/No	Select Yes or No from the drop-down menu.
Single Choice	Enter a choice, or select from the drop-down menu. The list results will update as you type.
Multiple Choice	Enter a choice, or select from the drop-down menu. The results will update as you type.

Coding contracts via send to field

You can use the send to field feature to send text found in a document to a field on a layout via the context menu of the Contracts Viewer.

You can intuitively select text and populate a field. Contracts saves the location of your text and links it to the field so that whenever you click that field again, it opens to that location in the document. This is powerful for QC workflows where the QCer wants to know why a reviewer made a certain coding decision.

Supported field types

Send to field works for all field types that Contracts supports for coding documents.

For each field type listed in Group 1, Contracts uses the contract text you select to send to field to populate the field value. It will then create a link between the text in the contract and the field.

Group 1

Fixed-length text
Long text
Date
Whole number
Decimal
Currency

You can configure fixed-length text fields with length up to 4,999 characters. Long text fields can exceed this. The technical limitation of a long text field is 2 GB. If you try to code a text field and you exceed these limitations, you'll receive an error.

For the field types in Group 2, sending to field will create the link between the text in contract and the field but you must select your values to finish coding the field.

Group 2

Single/multiple object
Single/multiple choice
Yes/no

Send to field from the text viewer

To send text to field from the text viewer:

Select text in your document and right click to choose the Send to Field option in the context menu. A confirmation window will appear where you can edit the selection before sending it to a field. This is helpful if you need to make change due to an OCR mistake.

You can remove hard returns from the text by clicking the Remove Hard Returns toggle. This automatically removes all hard returns in the text so that you don't need to do this manually within the text field.
Click on a field on a layout in the right pane of the viewer.
If you select a Group 1 field type, you are done and can Save.
If you select a Group 2 field type, select a value and Save.
After saving, a green underline will appear under your text and a green dot will appear near the field. If you click the field, it will navigate you to the text and the underline will turn orange.

Send to field highlights appear as green blocks in the Highlights minimap.

Send to field from the image viewer

To send to field from the image viewer, follow the steps for sending to field from the text viewer. The slide out at the top of the page will include the cropped image of your selection to compare to the extracted text below it. As with the text viewer, you can edit the text before sending to field.

Sending to long text fields multiple times

For long text fields, you can send to one field many times from different locations. For example, if you have an All Assignment Language field and assignment language appears throughout the contract, you can send each location to the field.

When a long text field already contains text and you send to field again, you'll see a modal to append, prepend, or replace.

Prepend—will place your new text before the existing text.
Append—will place your new text after the existing text.
Replace—will replace existing text with your new text.

If you choose to Prepend or Append, hover over the field after you Save to see how many highlight locations that field has associated with it. If you click the field multiple times, it will cycle through all highlights.

Coding contracts with data point suggestions

Administrators can configure data point suggestions, which use regular expressions and persistent highlights results to suggest possible values to help reviewers make a coding decision.

For an explanation on how to configure data point suggestions, see Set up data points in the viewer.

Using data point suggestions, reviewers can expand a field to show suggested values, and send them to the field. This can guide reviewers in the direction of highly relevant data and increase the speed and accuracy of review projects.

To code documents using fields linked by data point suggestions:

Click the link icon to the right of the field name.
Click on the data point group to expand and view all individual results. The number at the far right of the group name represents the total number of results found.
Clicking a result takes you to its location in the contract. From here, you can assess the relevance to the field.
Hover over a result and click the check mark to populate the field with that value. This functions the same as using Send to Field.

Coding at the section level

When you are coding a document in the Contracts Viewer, your coding decisions will save on the parent root agreement by default . If you would like a coding decision to save on a section document instead:

Right click on a section in the left pane of the Contracts Viewer and click Code Section.
The layout on the right will reload and a header bar will appear notifying you that you are coding a section. The coding values are now reflected for the section document, not the main document.
Make coding decisions on the layout as you normally would. Code Section supports send-to-field and all other coding capabilities.
Once you make your coding decisions, click Save .
Saving does not exit section coding mode. To exit section coding mode and begin coding the main document again, click the Exit button in the header bar.