Last date modified: 2025-Aug-13

Investigations in RelativityOne

Organizations often execute investigations by searching email, documents, instant messages, network drives, user share folders, logs, and other data sources in their native format or native application. RelativityOne enhances your investigation by expanding the standard set of tools used to find and analyze data and document findings.

For videos and tutorials that cover the basics of Investigations in RelativityOne, see the Investigations Introduction learning path.

An investigation starts after an event or sequence of events have created risk or the possibility of risk to an organization. Organizations have policies that certain events immediately trigger an investigation. An investigation may also occur on an ad hoc basis as a result of a unique set of circumstances.

Investigations are bound by corporate policy, procedure, or sometimes regulatory rule. They are not triggered or enforced by a legal document request or other binding legal authority. An investigator is primarily interested in what occurred before and after an event, developing an understanding of the key players in the event, and reporting conclusions to management.

The results of an investigation can be inconclusive, or the examination shows that the event did not occur as it was originally described. Once an investigation concludes, the organization makes decisions to address the issues at the heart of the investigation or to reduce the possibility of the event occurring again.

You can use RelativityOne to identify the communications and information that describes how and why an event occurred. Specifically, you can find participants involved in creating the documents, disseminating information, and helping or obstructing an investigation. In addition, RelativityOne’s reporting and visualization tools can be used to help inform and instruct others on the sequence of events.

Once you have identified the people involved in the incident or event and you have processed your data into RelativityOne you’re ready to get started with your investigation.

Search for Key Documents

There are a number of ways for you to find key documents through RelativityOne's searching capability as part of your investigations workflow.

Search by term

You can search by term via the following methods:

TermExample
  • Simple Term Searches – run terms in the Term Search (or “dtSearch”) box at the top of the Documents list.
Simple term search example
  • Boolean Searches – string together key names or phrases with and or or (ex: business and pleasure) .
Boolean search example
  • Proximity Searches – reduce search results using proximity operators –
    w/# where # is the number of terms between the words. For example, business w/5 pleasure for records where the word business appears within 5 words of the word pleasure.
Proximity search example

Visualize and document searches

Using Search Terms Reports, you can run a series of terms separately at once so that you can view all the results together on a dashboard and view the terms highlighted in the documents. You can then export these dashboards from Relativity to add to the report of your findings.

DashboardExample
  • Viewing the results in a dashboard -
    use a Search Terms
    Report widget on a dashboard to easily
    see the terms hit on by the returned
    document set. Click on any term to
    easily filter for documents with hits on that term.
Search terms report dashboard example
  • View the results with viewer highlights -
    When you associate the terms in a Search Terms
    Report with a Persistent Highlight Set, they will
    automatically be highlighted in the document Viewer.
Persistent highlight set example in viewer

Search by document concepts

You can search by document concepts via the following method.

WidgetExample
  • Use the Cluster visualization widget to
    understand the topics associated to
    documents in your returned set.
    Click into a cluster segment or sub-segment
    to filter specifically for documents that contain
    that concept. Find additional search terms
    from the clusters or explore documents in
    clusters to get a sense of the subject matters in documents.
Cluster visualization widget example

Search by document attributes

You can search by document attributes via the following methods.

AttributeExample
  • Filter on dates - click and drag on a
    date widget     to quickly filter for documents whose
    sent or created date fall between specific months or years.
Date widget example
  • Save and rerun searches -
    saved searches     allow you to string together
    a combination of term searches with date
    filters and more into a search that can be rerun
    later. The RelativityOne Investigation Template has
    a number of saved searches included by
    default to pull back specific kinds of documents.
Saved search example

Review Communications

You can use the following communication analysis methods as part of your RelativityOne Investigations workflow.

WidgetExample
  • Analyze communications - use the
    Communication Analysis widget     to
    understand how people are communicating
    with each other. Select a key player and see
    who they communicated with. Visit the Entity
    object to see all email aliases for the people in the investigation.
Communication analysis widget example
  • Visualize email threads - follow the
    email conversation with email thread visualization.
    Click email thread visualization icon in the
    document viewer to see the visualization
    and select the nodes to see
    how events were captured in emails.
Email threading visualization example

Document Findings

Use the following methods to report on the findings of your investigation.

MethodExample
  • Mark relevant documents - mark key documents as Relevant in the coding pane of the document
    viewer and leave a comment describing why it’s important. You can tag documents that are critical to the investigation as Hot Doc.
Relevant coding example in coding pane
  • Download PDFs of relevant documents -
    narrow the document list to pull back relevant
    documents and run a mass PDF operation
    to download them all as PDFs.
Download PDF mass operation example
  • Download a list of relevant files -
    create a report of your findings by using
    the mass Export to File operation to
    download to a CSV or Excel file.
Export to file mass operation example

Tips

Consider using the following during your RelativityOne Investigations workflow.

TipExample
  • Document preview - especially at the
    beginning on your investigation,
    use the Document Preview functionality
    on the list page to preview documents
    quickly without having to open them in the full viewer.
Document preview example
  • Extracted text view - when your document
    set is primarily emails, consider using a
    document view that only returns Extracted Text
    to more easily scan documents for interesting content.
Extracted text view example
  • Exclude non-inclusive emails - create custom views
    and filters that exclude non-inclusive emails
    and duplicate documents to cull down
    the number of returned documents.
Exclude non-inclusive emails display
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