Manually group contract families

When your workspace contains related documents—such as amendments, addendums, exhibits, schedules, and other supplemental agreements—you can group them under a single root agreement so they appear together in the Contracts Viewer. Manual grouping is useful when the auto-grouping feature does not capture the relationships you need, or when you are working with documents that were added to Relativity outside of a standard analysis workflow.

Contracts assigns each analyzed document a unique identifier in the Contracts Related Documents field. To group related documents manually, you apply the same identifier (or a custom value) to every document that belongs to the same contract family.

Group related documents to a root agreement

To group related documents that are already in your workspace:

Create a layout that contains the Contracts Related Documents and Contracts Related Order fields.
Create a view that includes the same two fields as columns.
On the Documents tab, filter the document list to display only the documents you want to group together.
Select all the filtered documents by clicking the Check All box in the upper-left corner of the list.
Locate the root agreement in the list and copy the value from its Contracts Related Documents field.
You can skip this step if you plan to use a custom value instead of the system-generated identifier.
At the bottom of the document list, click Edit in the mass actions bar.
In the Edit Documents dialog, select the layout you created in step 1 from the drop-down menu.
In the Contracts Related Documents field, paste the identifier you copied in step 5 or enter your custom value.
Select the check box next to the Contracts Related Documents field to include it in the mass edit.
Click Save.

All documents with the same Contracts Related Documents value now appear together in the Related Documents pane of the Contracts Viewer.

Create a custom order

Once the documents are grouped together, you can configure the order in which they are displayed in the Related Documents pane in the Contracts Viewer.

To create a custom order in the Contracts Related Documents pane:

In Relativity, select Edit in the Mass Action drop-down menu. Locate the Contracts Related Order field in the pop-up window.
Give the root agreement an order of 0.
Continue ordering the remaining documents. Using increments of 10 is best.

Ordering scenarios

Following are common scenarios that can happen when using ordering and solutions for each scenario.

Scenario 1

Five documents with the same Contracts Related Documents ID all have a Contracts Related Order that is blank or zero.

Solution

The top document on the left pane will be the lowest Artifact ID. The four documents in the Related Documents pane are ordered by Artifact ID, with lowest on top.

Scenario 2

Five documents with the same Contracts Related Documents ID all have a Contracts Related Order of zero through five.

Solution

The top document on the left pane has a Contracts Related Order of zero, and the four documents in Related Documents are listed from one to five, with one on top.

Scenario 3

Five documents with the same Contracts Related Documents ID all have a Contracts Related Order of blank or zero except for one, which has a Contracts Related Order of 10.

Solution

The top document on the left pane is the one with a Contracts Related Order of ten, and the four documents in Related Documents will be ordered by Artifact ID, with lowest on top.

Group related documents to root agreements using Import/Export

You can also use a load file to group documents and set their display order in the Contracts Viewer.

Open the .csv load file you plan to import.
Add the Contracts Related Documents and Contracts Related Order columns to your load file.
For each document you want to group together, enter the same identifier in the Contracts Related Documents column. Use the root agreement's existing identifier, or create a custom value.
In the Contracts Related Order column, enter 0 for the root agreement. Enter incremental values (such as 1, 2, 3) for the remaining documents, in the order you want them to appear.
In Relativity, Import your document load file via Import/Export.
On the Field Mappings dialog, use Auto Map Fields or manually map the Contracts Related Documents and Contracts Related Order fields.
After the import completes, navigate to the Documents tab and verify that the Contracts Related Documents and Contracts Related Order fields contain the values from your load file.
Open the Contracts Viewer. Your grouped documents appear in the Related Documents pane.