How Do I Mark a Document as Key After Creating a Chronology?

Last updated: February 23, 2026

How to Mark a Document as Key After Creating a Chronology

Quick answer: You cannot currently mark a document as a key document after the chronology has been created. However, you can achieve a similar effect by editing the matter summary to include the important information from the missed document. The matter summary drives relevance scoring, so updating it will adjust which entries are ranked as most relevant.

Why Key Documents Matter

Key documents are used during chronology creation to generate the matter summary and to influence how Mary scores relevance across all entries. If an important document was not marked as key before processing, the matter summary may not reflect its content, and relevance scoring may not prioritise related entries.

The Matter Summary Workaround

Because the matter summary drives relevance scoring, you can manually add information from the missed key document directly into the summary. This achieves a similar effect to having marked it as key during creation.

  1. Navigate to the Summary tab on the left-hand side of your matter.

  2. Click the "Edit" button on the right-hand side of the summary page.

  3. Add the key facts, parties, dates, and issues from the missed document into the relevant sections of the summary.

  4. Save your changes. Relevance scores across the chronology will update to reflect the new summary content.

For more detail on editing summaries, see the Adding Matter Summaries Manually article.

Practical Example

A commercial litigation practitioner creates a chronology from a large bundle of correspondence but forgets to mark the underlying contract as a key document. As a result, the matter summary focuses on the correspondence rather than the contractual terms at the heart of the dispute.

Solution: Open the Summary tab, click Edit, and add the key contractual details -- such as the parties, execution date, key clauses in dispute, and breach allegations. After saving, Mary will re-score relevance across all entries, and entries related to those contractual terms will be ranked higher.

Alternative Approach

If the missed key document contains substantial content that is difficult to summarise manually, you can:

  1. Create a new matter with just the key documents (including the one you missed).

  2. Let Mary generate a summary for the new matter.

  3. Copy the relevant summary content from the new matter into the summary of your original matter.

This approach uses additional credits but ensures the summary content is comprehensive.

Known Limitations

No post-creation key document marking. The ability to mark documents as key after creating a chronology is not currently available. This is a known limitation and is being actively worked on. In the meantime, editing the matter summary is the most effective workaround.

If This Doesn't Resolve Your Issue

  1. After editing the summary, check whether relevance scores have updated by sorting entries by relevance.

  2. If relevance scores do not appear to change, try refreshing the page after saving the summary edits.

  3. If you need further guidance on what to include in the summary, email support@marytechnology.com with the matter name and a description of the document you want to add as a key document.