Format guide
DAT
Concordance/Relativity load file
DAT is the metadata + extracted-text load file format every U.S. eDiscovery production uses. Produced by Concordance, Relativity, Reveal, Logikcull, Everlaw, and every law firm review platform. Uses non-printable Unicode characters (U+0014 field delimiter, U+00FE text qualifier) instead of CSV's commas + quotes — the unusual delimiters avoid collisions with quoted text inside fields like email body content. CRLF line terminators (Concordance is Windows-native).
How to open a DAT file
Concordance, Relativity, Reveal, Everlaw, Logikcull, and every other eDiscovery review platform load DAT files natively. Excel opens them but shows garbled þ characters. Convert to CSV for spreadsheet workflows; the original DAT remains the production-of-record format.
Primary use
eDiscovery document production metadata exchange between law firms.
Convert other formats to DAT
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