Set up object coding mode

One challenge in contract review is determining how to visualize and report on the latest source of truth for a family of documents when a contract was amended in various ways over time. It could be that the family does not contain amendments, but related documents with key information. It can be difficult to make sense of key data at the family level.

One solution for this scenario is creating Contract Family custom objects and creating a new object for each contract family. This allows information to be populated and reviewed at the family level in addition to the document level.

For example, if you have an employment agreement with four amendments and the compensation section has changed over time, a Contracts user would create a contract family object for the employment agreement family, create a field for Compensation on the family object, and code that field with the latest source of truth for the family. Object Coding Mode allows users to configure this Contract Family object, or any custom object, to open in the Contracts Viewer when clicking the Edit button from the Relativity object list.

In the Contracts viewer:

  • The list and queue on the left side of the viewer are for the objects from the list you came from, not for documents.
  • The layouts on the right pane are layouts on the object. Fields on that layout are fields on the object.
  • The multi-object field for documents that you've added to the object will show up on the layout as an inline list. Clicking a document in this list will display it in the viewer. You can still code an object if no documents are linked to it.
  • You can send to field on the object across documents. For example, you can send the original contract's effective date to an Original Effective Date field and the effective date from the latest amendment to a Latest Effective Date field. If you click the green dot on either field, it will take you to the correct document. You can send to field across documents and get a good overall picture of the latest source of truth and where it lives.
  • You can right-click a data point to link it to a field on the object, just as you can link data points to fields when coding documents.

To set up object coding mode:

  1. Go to the Contracts Settings tab.
  2. For Object Type to code, select the object you'd like to configure to open in the Contracts Viewer.
  3. Click Save.
  4. Add an object list for documents to a layout on the object. This is a requirement for object coding mode.
  5. Verify that all the documents have run through analysis.
  6. Click the Edit icon from the list of objects for the object type you selected in step 2.

The Contracts Viewer will open in Object Coding Mode.