The use of computational chemistry provides support for the interpretation of experimental studies and allows making predictions about the properties of systems not yet synthesized. Quantum chemistry methods with different levels of electronic structure treatments are more easily found due to computational advances. However, some approximations are still required because of the significant demand for computational resources associated to more advanced methods. Thus, the results obtained may not adequately represent the properties of the systems studied. In the case of compounds containing heavy elements, such as many catalysts, studies that take into account the relativistic effects would be need. Thus, a kinetic study of four reaction categories involving systems containing heavy atoms was conducted. It was noticed that the scalar relativistic effects are generally predominant and that there is not significant differences between the results from the ZORA method in relation to the traditional RECP treatment during the determination of optimized geometries. Nevertheless, the DKH2 calculations failed to describe the geometric parameters of platinum compounds with the same efficiency. On the other hand, it was possible to observe that relativistic effects are very important for a reliable determination of other properties related to chemical kinetics, such as the relative energies along the reaction mechanism. In this case, in addition to scalar relativistic effects, the spin-orbit coupling also becomes crucial for an accurate description of the activation barriers in compounds with elements from the sixth period and beyond. Therefore, a two-step combined treatment is recommended for a correct description of the systems. In general, the geometry optimization step can be performed at the RECP level. However, in order to obtain accurate energy values by relativistic methods, we suggest the use of four-component treatments such as Dirac-Coulomb (DC) and exact two-component formalisms like X2C-MMF.