Persistent highlight sets

With persistent highlight sets you can configure and apply term highlighting to assist with document review in the Viewer. In the Persistent Highlight Pane of the Viewer, you can see all sets saved in a workspace and apply or hide term highlights in the document you're reviewing.

If a document you're reviewing contains any of the terms specified in a set, the list of terms and the number of times they appear in the document appear under the set. If a document contains no terms from the set, you can't expand or collapse the set in the tree. If the document contains some terms in the set, only the terms that exist in the document appear below the set name.

System admins can control which highlight sets different users see when working within a document. See Workspace security Workspace security in the Admin guide.

Persistent highlight sets are independent of markup sets. See Markup sets Markup sets in the Admin guide.

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Using persistent highlight sets

You’re a system admin and one of your clients, a medical patient advocate group, is suing a hospital system because their IT department accidentally allowed a security breach that resulted in the theft of thousands of patients’ social security numbers and pieces of personal health information.

The data set you need to review for this case includes thousands of emails, invoices, and other notifications containing references to the pieces of information that were compromised in the breach. You need to equip a small group of reviewers with everything they need to find relevant documents as quickly as possible. You want your reviewers to find and code all files related to the following:

  • Social security number
  • Biometrics
  • Medicare
  • Insurance
  • Diagnosis
  • Treatment
  • Beneficiaries

You created coding layouts, views, and search indexes, and now you want to enable your reviewers to quickly and easily locate instances of these terms in the documents they’re reviewing. For that, you use persistent highlight sets.

You create a new persistent highlight set with a name of “Patient Privacy,” which is congruent with the other objects you’ve already set up for this case. You give this set an order of 10 and you select Terms for the Source field choice. Then, in the Terms field, you enter the terms most prevalent to the data set and the specific highlight colors in which you want those terms to appear.

When you save this new persistent highlight set, reviewers can select it from a menu for every document they load in the Viewer. When they apply highlights, the document instantly points them to the locations of each term that appears. From there, they can easily tell if the document is responsive and if it’s worthy of being coded for some of the issues you’ve defined in this case. With this new persistent highlight set, you’ve expedited and ensured a thorough document review project.

Getting started with persistent highlight sets

You create persistent highlight sets in the Persistent Highlight Sets tab of a workspace. Each set includes a list of terms populated manually or from a source field in the set configuration. After you create a persistent highlight set, the set and its terms are available in the Persistent Highlight Pane of the Viewer.

The following persistent highlight set includes several terms with highlight color-coding. See Color-coding persistent highlights for more information.

This set is available when a user opens the viewer and any edits made to this set are reflected immediately.

Showing and hiding persistent highlight sets in the Viewer

To view the list of available persistent highlights sets and related terms in the Persistent Highlight pane, click the Show/Hide Persistent Highlight Pane icon in the left drawer.


Click the next to a persistent highlight set to expand it and show the list of terms from that set found in the document. By default, all persistent highlight sets are enabled in the Viewer, and terms found in a document are selected in the Persistent Highlight Pane and highlighted in the document. Click a persistent highlight set's name or the icon to hide all term highlights from the set in the Viewer. When a persistent highlight set's icon is and the terms appear partially transparent in the Persistent Highlight Pane, the term highlights for the set are hidden in the Viewer.

Clear a term's check box to hide its highlights in the Viewer. Select its check box to apply highlighting for the term in the Viewer again.

If any of the set’s terms aren't present in the current document open in the Viewer, they don't display in the Persistent Highlight Pane. For example, if you created a set named Investments that contains five highlight terms, and only three of the terms show in the pane for a particular document, the other two terms aren't present in the document.

You can navigate through the hits for a persistent highlight set or for a term while viewing a document in the Viewer. Click on either the persistent highlight set or the desired term in the Persistent Highlight Pane and the Go to Next/Previous Highlights icons display in the row.

You can use the Next/Previous icons to cycle through the hits for either the persistent highlight set or the highlighted term. Regardless of where you are in a document, when you click the Next icon for the first time, you will be taken to the first highlight in the document for that persistent highlight set or term even if you've moved past it while browsing the document.

Clicking the Next/Previous icons also emphasizes the actively navigated highlight with an orange glow to help you track which one is active.

When you select a persistent highlight term in the Persistent Highlight Pane, in addition to highlighting all instances of that term in the body of an email, the Viewer also highlights instances of the term in the email header.

The number of terms and hits is listed to the left of the persistent highlight set's name. It is possible to have many highlight sets enabled but no highlights appear in a document.

Selections made in the Persistent Highlight pane persist throughout a user's session in Relativity. This includes any of the following changes related to the Persistent Highlight Pane in the Viewer:

  • Showing or hiding the Persistent Highlight Pane.
  • Enabling or disabling a persistent highlight set.
  • Expanding or collapsing the term list for a persistent highlight set.
  • Checking or clearing terms check boxes in a persistent highlight set.

To navigate between terms highlighted on a document in the Viewer, use the Go to Previous Highlight and Go to Next Highlight icons on the Viewer toolbar.

The Go to Previous Highlight and Go to Next Highlight icons only navigate between terms enabled in the Persistent Highlight Pane.

When navigating through a document's highlighted terms, the following notification displays in the bottom-left to inform you that you've reached the beginning or end of the document and there are no more highlights.

Actively navigated and inactive highlights

To support advanced highlights within persistent highlight sets, two types colors can be available in the Viewer - actively navigated and inactive highlights. The colors are the same, but have a different level of opacity. Active highlights are the highlights that the Viewer is focused on. Active highlights are at full opacity and inactive highlights are at a lower opacity level. See Color-coding persistent highlights for more information.

Note: Beginning in Relativity 11.3.1, the auto-contrast feature has been added to color-coding persistent highlights. This feature automatically determines the text color based off the background color you select to ensure readability no matter which colors are selected. For example, if the background color is closer to black, the text will automatically be white or if the background color is closer to white, the text will automatically be black.

Note: The opacity level of the highlights for proximity searching and inactive terms can be adjusted by editing the value of the ViewerHighlightStyleDefault instance setting.

Color name Highlight Color Number
[Default]   0
Black   1
Dark red   2
Dark green   3
Dark yellow   4
Dark blue   5
Dark magenta   6
Dark cyan   7
Light gray   8
Gray   9
Red   10
Green   11
Yellow   12
Blue   13
Magenta   14
Cyan   15
White   16
Light green   17
Light blue   18
Light yellow   19
Light purple   20
Light red   21
Light orange   22
Purple   23
Orange   24
Dark purple   25
Dark orange   26

Persistent highlight set behavior across Viewers

Note the following regarding persistent highlight set behavior as the reviewer moves from document to document, changes Viewers, and uses pane toggles:

  • Any changes made to a persistent highlight set tree in the panel when the Viewer is undocked, such as terms selected or unselected, will display when the Viewer is docked again.
  • A synced standalone Viewer won't display changes made to a persistent highlight set, such as terms selected or unselected, in the pane of the main Viewer. However, Persistent Highlight Pane settings remain the same in the standalone Viewer as the reviewer goes from doc to doc within the standalone Viewer.
  • The Persistent Highlight Pane maintains its current state when you swap Viewer panes.
  • The Persistent Highlight Pane in the Extracted Text Viewer and Native Viewer are independent of each other. A change made to the pane in the Extracted Text Viewer is not automatically reflected when the reviewer switches to the Native Viewer and vice versa.
  • Advanced persistent highlighting, available when using a search term report as a highlight field source, is only available in the Native and Extracted Text Viewer. See Using the highlight fields source.

See Viewer for more information.

Persistent highlight behavior

When using a search term report that includes search syntax as a highlights source field, the highlight behavior is more inclusive than using persistent highlight terms. See Using the highlight fields source.

The different levels of opacity occur on a key term and interval term level. The key terms in the search are high opacity level highlights. The other interval terms picked up with search syntax are highlighted at a lower opacity level. For example, if you use the search "account w/5 cap" the words "account" and "cap" are highlighted with the full opacity highlight. The words between "account" and "cap" will have the lower opacity level highlight.

Using multiple persistent highlight sets

During the course of a review, the number of terms can grow as legal teams learn more about the case and the documents in it. In these cases, it may be beneficial to create multiple highlight sets.

With multiple highlight sets you'll have better organization and control over highlighted terms. For example, you may want to create highlight sets for:

  • Key Terms
  • Privilege Terms
  • Specific Issue Terms (unique terms)

You can visually group related terms by assigning a different highlight color to the terms in each highlight set.

When multiple highlight sets include the same term the colors used in each set will mix together. For example, if a highlight set includes the term "apple" highlighted in blue and another highlight set includes the term "apple" highlighted in red, the highlight color will combine and display as purple in the Viewer. This only applies if both highlight sets are active for the same term.

Persistent highlighting sets and individual terms can be toggled on or off depending on reviewers’ preferences or needs. A reviewer can control which sets or terms they have highlighted during review.

Clicking on the light bulb icon for a persistent highlight set enables or disables highlighting for the entire set. The icon indicates a persistent highlight set is enabled in the Persistent Highlight Pane. The icon indicates a persistent highlight set is disabled in the Persistent Highlight pane. When disabling a persistent highlight set in the Viewer, terms included in the set aren't highlighted in documents until the set is enabled again.

Clicking a check box activates or deactivates highlighting for an individual term.

Security is another way to control persistent highlight sets. System admins can use object-level security to display only the persistent highlights sets necessary for users to complete their reviews. Limiting the visibility of persistent highlight sets also provides a cleaner interface for reviewers. See Relativity object security for more information.

Performance considerations

Several factors can affect the performance of persistent highlight sets. These factors include individual document size, the number of terms, the types of operators used, and the performance of the local machine. For more information about how to create high performance searches, visit Creating efficient searches for persisten highlighting.

Individual document size

The size of individual documents affects persistent highlighting performance, not the workspace's document count. The larger the document, the longer it takes for persistent highlighting to compare and highlight each term in the document against the term list.

For example, Excel files with many tabs require more time to load. Persistent highlighting searches the contents of each tab, compares each term against the term list, highlights any term matches, then moves to the next tab until it has gone through the entire document. A 500-page document takes much longer to render highlights than a one-page email.

Number of terms

When using the Terms Search option as your source for persistent highlighting, performance can slow down as the list of terms grows. Performance degradation can occur once the list reaches 100 terms, and significant slowness occurs at 500 terms depending on the resources of your local machine. If you have a large list of terms, using Highlight Fields through search terms reports is a better solution.

Types of operators used

Creating efficient searches improves the performance of persistent highlighting whether working with a Terms Search or Highlight Fields. See Creating efficient searches for persistent highlighting.

Local machine

Persistent highlighting is rendered by the local machine, not by the Relativity server. If the resources for the local machine are strained, it will also affect performance.