Recommind's accurate and automated concept search software enables users to quickly and easily pinpoint information they need. MindServer™ Enterprise Search combines sophisticated search technology with a simple user interface that provides highly accurate results tailored to the information requirements of the organization. Rules-based access enables organizations to customize results for each user, giving optimal relevancy for users as well as increased control over the display and ranking of information for administrators.
Like many organisations, law firms have an odd relationship with information.
And because they know it's important they are loathe to delete anything (just in case)...
Multiple repositories and systems, multiple offices and locations, multiple content processes and procedures leads to an excess of information and knowledge - all of it potentially valuable, but much of it virtually impossible to actually find at the time a lawyer or information professional needs it.
Even with these IT and KM investments in law firms, it seems the frustrations remain: I can't find anything. It takes too long to find what I need.
What is ‘The Answer'?
the focus of law firms over the last decade has been absolutely correct: to concentrate on people and processes through KM, and on new information technologies and tools through their IT budgets. But maybe there's a third prong that's been missing from this focus? The messy middle: the content assets, the actual information itself contained in documents, e-mails, web pages, blogs, journals, books, video and podcasts etc.
The huge investments for enterprise search - providing lawyer and legal information professional alike with a single search box sitting over multiple repositories and offices - have certainly seen great improvements in uncovering information within a law firm.
Developments out there on the Web in faceted search (e.g. filtering a search for cameras by brand, price and resolution) have begun to seep through the walls of our firms and organisations.
Enterprise search has started to uncover some of the mess that we didn't even know was there. As well as showing, rather too starkly, the mess that we haven't wanted to deal with over the years: the poor tagging of content with useful terms or even consistent terms across different repositories; the lack of rigorous info management processes to identify the valuable, useful and re-usable information, or equally, to identify the duplicate, out-of-date or inaccurate information.
law firms are now thinking and willing to invest in ways to actually clean and fix some of this information mess.
Reviewing and improving a firm's Enterprise Information Architecture (or Firmwide IA) through an information housekeeping initiative is becoming a priority.
What does that involve?
Well-defined and understood business rules and workflow for the firm's information and knowledge are essential components to Firmwide IA
Systems & Tools
Information & Information Architecture Assets
Governance
The benefits of investing in Firmwide IA and these four themes, may be broadly stated as:
to boost its access to the worldwide legal and compliance industry.
Interwoven, strong in content management software, has historically competed with Documentum, now a unit of EMC, FileNet, now part of IBM, and Open Text of Canada.
Interwoven has 4,600 customers, including 71 percent of the top 100 law firms and 100,000 corporate Web sites.
"Businesses and firms are being overwhelmed with electronic records. Enterprise search offers a promising way to deal with the growth of electronically stored information. However, not all search technologies are well adapted to serve as the search backbone for an enterprise. While key word searching may help find some documents in document collections, more sophisticated search technologies are called for to assimilate and organize content across the enterprise. We have found that Recommind's Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) search engine is particularly well-suited for law firm and professional services environments, both because of the inherent power of PLSA and because Recommind's strong and diverse search platform is focused on solving problems inherent in the legal enterprise."
MindServer™ Legal is a comprehensive product suite designed to meet the categorization, search and retrieval needs of legal environments. MindServer Legal wraps around all appropriate information repositories, enabling quick and easy access to relevant information.
Recommind has continued its success in the legal sector in 2008 with deployments announced with law firms including Simmons & Simmons, Reed Smith, Addleshaw Goddard and Eversheds. Recommind’s MindServer™ Enterprise Search platform enables law firms to search all databases and core knowhow across multiple locations, allowing lawyers to easily access and share the information they need.
Recommind, a provider of enterprise search, email management and eDisclosure systems for enterprises and law firms, today announced that it has been shortlisted in the ‘Best of Breed System of the Year’ and ‘Most Customer-Focused Supplier of the Year’ categories for the Legal Technology Awards 2009.
Many law firms in Canada (and the United States) use Interwoven for their document management system (DMS). Interwoven is a very robust DMS that can manage large volumes of documents while keeping good version control and honoring security settings.