Moving a Concordance load file into Relativity
Relativity imports the same Concordance-style DAT that Concordance itself uses, so "converting Concordance to Relativity" is really about getting the DAT clean and the fields mapped correctly, not translating one binary format to another. The DAT uses the default Concordance delimiter set — field delimiter ¶ (ASCII 20), text qualifier þ (254), and the in-field newline marker ® (174) — and Relativity's import wizard expects exactly those characters unless you tell it otherwise.
The two things that trip up an import are encoding and families. Concordance DATs are frequently saved as Windows-1252 (ANSI), where each delimiter is a single byte; if a tool re-saves the file as UTF-16 or strips the control characters, the field boundaries break. This converter detects the byte-order mark, decodes the file correctly, and re-serializes the DAT with the proper single-byte delimiters so Relativity reads the columns as intended. It also reads the BEGATTACH/ENDATTACH fields so you can confirm document families are intact before you load: a parent email and its attachments share a BEGATTACH value, and the tool reports how many true attachment families and standalone documents your DAT contains.
Use the converter to sanity-check a DAT before import, to re-emit a DAT that another tool mangled, or to produce a CSV copy for a quick look in Excel. Nothing about the production — custodians, privilege calls embedded in the metadata, extracted text — is uploaded anywhere.
Open the converter — free, no upload
A clean Concordance-to-Relativity workflow
- Drop the .dat into the converter; confirm the document count and family breakdown it reports match what you expect.
- If the file came in a different encoding, convert it back to a DAT to normalize the delimiters and encoding.
- In Relativity's import wizard, set the column, quote and newline delimiters to the Concordance defaults (¶, þ, ®).
- Map BEGBATES as the identifier, point ENDBATES/PAGECOUNT at their fields, and map BEGATTACH/ENDATTACH so families group on load.
Questions
Does Relativity need a different file than Concordance?
No. Both read the same delimited DAT. The work is in correct delimiters, encoding and field mapping — not a format conversion. This tool gives you a correctly-encoded DAT to import.
How do document families survive the move?
Families are defined by shared BEGATTACH values, with the parent's BEGATTACH equal to its own BEGBATES. As long as those fields are present and mapped in Relativity's wizard, the family groups rebuild on import. The converter shows you the family counts up front so you can verify.
What are the actual Concordance delimiter characters?
Field delimiter is ASCII 20 (often shown as ¶), the text qualifier is ASCII 254 (þ), and an in-value line break is stored as ASCII 174 (®). Set those three in any import wizard reading a standard Concordance DAT.