The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/163881
best practices THE FORMULA FOR SEARCH SUCCESS In the current resource-constrained environment, where heightened client expectations demand an unprecedented level of speed and efficiency, it is imperative that legal teams find ways to leverage information. This is possible via a comprehensive platform for information integration and access that centers on strong search, supplemented with three key capabilities: 1.CONNECT: Bring data into the search experience in a secure and meaningful manner from the systems used in the firm. By combining content from multiple systems into a single index, a unified view can be created easily and flexibly. 2. NRICH: Increase the findability of content E and expertise through tagging, classification and content normalization. As the volume of content explodes, there is no possible way to maintain this kind of metadata manually, so machine-created metadata plays an essential role. 3.INTERACT: Activate content to allow for a deep, immersive experience with the information. This includes content exploration and visualization as well as document assembly and similar workflows that take action directly from the search experience. Embarking on a campaign to connect, enrich and interact will reduce end-to-end search time for legal staff while ensuring senior members of the legal team can find and reuse the information they need in the most efficient way possible regardless of its location. 10 Peer to Peer Free Your Minds with Collaboration and Social Sharing Employee habits and expectations at work increasingly are set by their online experiences at home. Everyone uses search engines as consumers, so there is no longer a tolerance for deficient search capabilities within the firm. Instead, there is an expectation of ease and accessibility. Similarly, social networking has become mainstream, both at home and in the office. Collaboration online is, therefore, central to transacting business, rather than ancillary to communication. Firms must streamline the nature of search within their organizations to provide a familiar, simplified and highly usable interface. They must also filter data results to promote sharing. Fostering social behavior of this type requires improvements in findability and an orientation toward learning from user choices. For example, if attorneys routinely select a particular motion for summary judgment as a sample on which to build, they are endorsing the relevance of that document. Knowledge Strategy: To maximize the utility of searching, organizations should develop a practice of tagging documents and enriching them with metadata. This can include manmade metadata (i.e., individuals classify documents with particular designations associated with related matters based on a preset taxonomy) and machine-made metadata where the technology automatically assigns the metadata based on the content and context of a document. Metadata can also track behavior (for example, frequently opening certain documents, which often indicates they are relevant). A dynamic system can infer key tags that should be associated with certain documents. It then displays them as part of the experience of finding and exploring content. By employing this system, a firm can improve its effectiveness and encourage collaboration, social sharing and content reuse. No Bad Trips: Security and Usability Despite the promise of an open and integrated technology platform, data security remains a prominent concern. Until IT teams convince their users these tools incorporate industry-leading safeguards, adoption rates might lag. Most firms have separate document management, practice management, CRM and billing systems. Each generally has a proprietary security model inconsistent with other platforms. To accommodate a unified view of the data landscape and address this lack of uniformity, IT administrators must install best-of-breed technology that blends security across multiple content silos with divergent requirements. This will let users interact with all relevant content easily and securely.