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KM Implementation At Reed Smith
Reed Smith, with more than 3,200 lawyers, paralegals, consultants and support staff spread across 22 offices throughout Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, had all of the data challenges you'd expect from a firm of our size and sophistication, with the added challenge that we were aggressively expanding from both a practice focus and headcount perspective. Despite the fact that our total data creation had increased exponentially, we hadn't invested nearly enough in our information infrastructure, and simple processes such as document retrieval were taking far too long. We knew we needed to take control of our data before it took hold of us. Following is an account of the firm's recent implementation of Recommind's MindServer Search platform as the foundation for its Knowledge Management (“KM”) infrastructure.
Due to a multitude of factors, including an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy and an expanding practice focus, Reed Smith has tripled in size over the last six years. This has put enormous pressure on our KM department to not only store corporate data, but also make it searchable and usable across the entire network. Exacerbating the firm's rapid expansion, the reliance on legacy technology and manual processes started hurting productivity and efficiency, as attorneys and their teams found themselves spending increasing amounts of time searching for documents or experts within the company.
To ease the burden on the KM department, address the exponentially growing data store and ensure that each employee was working with the best and most up-to-date resources, the firm decided to overhaul its KM system and implement an enterprise search platform. After reviewing and testing several vendors, the firm chose Recommind's MindServer Search software as it offered the best combination of functionality, reliability, accuracy and scalability for the firm's needs.
The Challenge
Before implementing the MindServer Search technology, the firm had stored its vast amount of data ' including both structured (e.g., Word documents, Excel sheets) and unstructured (e.g., Web pages and e-mail) data ' in myriad repositories. Because the repositories weren't connected and had no underlying search capability, employees were forced to manually search individual locations in order to find the information they needed. Not only was this process extremely time-consuming and inefficient, it offered no guarantee that the data found was precisely what each user needed, leaving the possibility that something was being missed, a threat no professional service firm can afford.
The legacy data repository system proved to be problematic in a number of other respects. For example, when an attorney or his or her staff could not locate a document, he or she would place a request with the KM department. This created a backlog of work for the already overburdened KM staff, pulling them away from core tasks to manually search individual repositories. Additionally, when anyone added, modified or removed a document from one of the repositories, someone had to manually update the log file to reflect the change. If someone skipped that process or labelled something incorrectly, the entire database would be affected.
In addition to the inefficiencies posed by the legacy system, the firm also lacked the ability to profile, track and locate experts within the organization. In a law firm of Reed Smith's size, complexity and geographical distribution, attorneys routinely seek counsel from their peers, particularly those with experience in a specific area. However, the firm's overall size and rapid growth, finding the most experienced attorney for a specific issue, region or area was essentially impossible.
In most cases, attorneys would simply try to find experts by sending a mass e-mail to the group. More often than not, they wouldn't get any replies at all, but in some instances they would receive a plethora of irrelevant replies and have to spend time sifting through these ' on top of the time other members of the firm were spending reading and responding to (or simply deleting) the original query. In any case, this approach rarely resulted in finding the right person at the right time. As a result, opportunities were missed and resources were left underutilized.
These challenges were not only affecting attorneys and their teams, but reverberated throughout the entire enterprise. The inability to locate documents and experts was also impacting departments such as administration, marketing and finance. Each of these departments frequently required access to documents from a variety of different sources as part of their daily tasks, but spent far too much time searching the separate databases in order to do so.
For law firms, especially large ones dealing with complex litigation, cross-border disputes and crucial regulatory matters, overlooking effective information management is simply not an option. A law firm's most valuable assets are its employees and their knowledge, and they need to be able to locate not just existing data and documents, but also quickly identify the person within the firm with the most relevant expertise or experience for a certain project, wherever they are based. Because of the sensitive nature of the legal profession, our staff cannot afford to miss any relevant information as this can leave lawyers either without the data they need, or potentially worse, with inaccurate data that cannot be used in court or in legal proceedings.
The Solution
To address data challenges, Reed Smith started looking for an enterprise search solution that could seamlessly integrate with existing systems and accurately and intelligently search a wide variety of data sources, providing employees with quick and easy access to the information they needed. After reviewing several leading solutions, Reed Smith decided that Recommind's MindServer Search offered the best combination of flexibility, accuracy and scalability, bolstered by an impeccable reputation and customer support.
Built on top of Recommind's CORE' (Context Optimised Relevancy Engine) platform, MindServer Search uses sophisticated concept-based technology to search within and across information resources, regardless of the language or subject. Because MindServer Search extracts concepts on its own, no training or manual intervention is needed to make it useful, resulting in lower deployment and maintenance effort and expense. With a simple interface and the ability to uniquely tailor results to the information requirements of the organization, MindServer Search can easily scale to incorporate many tens of millions of documents and terabytes of data with powerful indexing and querying performance.
After selecting MindServer Search, a six-week internal beta program was launched with 100 unique users. During that time frame, the testers conducted a multitude of searches ' including document and expertise location searches ' with extremely positive feedback and results.
The selection, testing and rollout of MindServer Search were all parts of a larger corporate initiative to radically overhaul the firm's Intranet. Once MindServer Search had passed all of the internal benchmarks, the solution was directly integrated into the Intranet; enabling employees to more effectively and efficiently search the system for the documents and expertise they needed. The firm's newly designed Intranet, known as ouRSpace', went live in February 2009, complete with a MindServer Search box sitting discreetly in the corner.
Integrating the technology directly into the Intranet replaces the standard search in the Microsoft SharePoint portal, adding the capability to simultaneously search across a wide range of information repositories. The portal is made up of a number of document- and content-management systems, including Interwoven, Elite, DataMagic, ProLaw and West KM, as well as news feeds, calendaring applications and a number of custom Web applications. MindServer Search automatically indexes these applications and integrates the information to present staff with the best search results possible.
Early Results
The firm's IT staff immediately noticed how easy MindServer Search was to deploy globally, requiring minimal training of staff. MindServer Search's simple, intuitive interface and general ease of use allowed the firm to avoid the implementation of a training program becoming a massively complicated and expensive endeavour.
Within days of deployment, the time required to find documents and experts had dropped dramatically and overall productivity began increasing exponentially. Replacing manual processes and simple keyword search with MindServer Search prevents relevant documents from being omitted, ensuring that legal staff have access to the information they need when and how they need it. This enabled attorneys and staff to allocate more time to billable activities, thereby improving client satisfaction and service, and providing the firm with significant competitive advantage.
In addition to reducing the time needed to find documents, MindServer Search's expertise location and matter-centricity allows staff to easily search a comprehensive company-wide system containing all matters, deals, and cases, as well as locating the vast array of experience across the entirety of the firm. By indexing every employees' work product, time sheet and biography, MindServer Search enables teams to quickly and efficiently locate the expertise they require, however specific or obscure it might seem. The ability to quickly search across a variety of information sources ' e.g., time and billing systems, CRM systems, portals, internal firm matter and case databases ' provides a detailed up-to-date profile of individuals and relevant subject areas, enabling attorneys to easily and accurately locate a colleague with the required expertise.
Moving Forward
Prior to deploying MindServer Search, Reed Smith's KM team worked side-by-side with Recommind for several weeks to customize the system to meet the firm's specific needs and data requirements. For example, Recommind's professional services team helped modify how search findings were weighted and ranked depending on job function and role. Even with the solution fully implemented and performing well, the firm's teams still confer regularly as they work to define and develop future enhancements and customizations as the usage and needs of the organizations mature and evolve.
Based on early successes, Reed Smith's KM team has started exploring new ways to evolve and refine ouRSpace. For example, the team has been analyzing user behaviour to indentify usage patterns and popular queries, documents and experts on both a global and regional level. This will enable them to effectively tailor ouRSpace for individual preferences, increasing the value of the system around the globe.
The impact that MindServer Search has had on the firm has been immediate and wide reaching. In addition to making better use of existing assets and experts and greatly improving overall productivity, the firm has also improved in areas that are harder to measure, namely customer and employee satisfaction. Employees are free to service clients, staff is free to support attorneys, and the KM and IT teams can focus on improving the network, not merely maintaining it. In a matter of months, the firm has been transformed from 22 disparate offices into one integrated, consistent organization. That kind of freedom resonates throughout the entire company.
Tom Baldwin is Chief Knowledge Officer at Reed Smith LLP. In this role, he helps assess technology tools that increase efficiency, streamline processes and improve productivity for the firm's lawyers and its clients. Baldwin can be reached at [email protected].
Due to a multitude of factors, including an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy and an expanding practice focus,
To ease the burden on the KM department, address the exponentially growing data store and ensure that each employee was working with the best and most up-to-date resources, the firm decided to overhaul its KM system and implement an enterprise search platform. After reviewing and testing several vendors, the firm chose Recommind's MindServer Search software as it offered the best combination of functionality, reliability, accuracy and scalability for the firm's needs.
The Challenge
Before implementing the MindServer Search technology, the firm had stored its vast amount of data ' including both structured (e.g., Word documents, Excel sheets) and unstructured (e.g., Web pages and e-mail) data ' in myriad repositories. Because the repositories weren't connected and had no underlying search capability, employees were forced to manually search individual locations in order to find the information they needed. Not only was this process extremely time-consuming and inefficient, it offered no guarantee that the data found was precisely what each user needed, leaving the possibility that something was being missed, a threat no professional service firm can afford.
The legacy data repository system proved to be problematic in a number of other respects. For example, when an attorney or his or her staff could not locate a document, he or she would place a request with the KM department. This created a backlog of work for the already overburdened KM staff, pulling them away from core tasks to manually search individual repositories. Additionally, when anyone added, modified or removed a document from one of the repositories, someone had to manually update the log file to reflect the change. If someone skipped that process or labelled something incorrectly, the entire database would be affected.
In addition to the inefficiencies posed by the legacy system, the firm also lacked the ability to profile, track and locate experts within the organization. In a law firm of
In most cases, attorneys would simply try to find experts by sending a mass e-mail to the group. More often than not, they wouldn't get any replies at all, but in some instances they would receive a plethora of irrelevant replies and have to spend time sifting through these ' on top of the time other members of the firm were spending reading and responding to (or simply deleting) the original query. In any case, this approach rarely resulted in finding the right person at the right time. As a result, opportunities were missed and resources were left underutilized.
These challenges were not only affecting attorneys and their teams, but reverberated throughout the entire enterprise. The inability to locate documents and experts was also impacting departments such as administration, marketing and finance. Each of these departments frequently required access to documents from a variety of different sources as part of their daily tasks, but spent far too much time searching the separate databases in order to do so.
For law firms, especially large ones dealing with complex litigation, cross-border disputes and crucial regulatory matters, overlooking effective information management is simply not an option. A law firm's most valuable assets are its employees and their knowledge, and they need to be able to locate not just existing data and documents, but also quickly identify the person within the firm with the most relevant expertise or experience for a certain project, wherever they are based. Because of the sensitive nature of the legal profession, our staff cannot afford to miss any relevant information as this can leave lawyers either without the data they need, or potentially worse, with inaccurate data that cannot be used in court or in legal proceedings.
The Solution
To address data challenges,
Built on top of Recommind's CORE' (Context Optimised Relevancy Engine) platform, MindServer Search uses sophisticated concept-based technology to search within and across information resources, regardless of the language or subject. Because MindServer Search extracts concepts on its own, no training or manual intervention is needed to make it useful, resulting in lower deployment and maintenance effort and expense. With a simple interface and the ability to uniquely tailor results to the information requirements of the organization, MindServer Search can easily scale to incorporate many tens of millions of documents and terabytes of data with powerful indexing and querying performance.
After selecting MindServer Search, a six-week internal beta program was launched with 100 unique users. During that time frame, the testers conducted a multitude of searches ' including document and expertise location searches ' with extremely positive feedback and results.
The selection, testing and rollout of MindServer Search were all parts of a larger corporate initiative to radically overhaul the firm's Intranet. Once MindServer Search had passed all of the internal benchmarks, the solution was directly integrated into the Intranet; enabling employees to more effectively and efficiently search the system for the documents and expertise they needed. The firm's newly designed Intranet, known as ouRSpace', went live in February 2009, complete with a MindServer Search box sitting discreetly in the corner.
Integrating the technology directly into the Intranet replaces the standard search in the
Early Results
The firm's IT staff immediately noticed how easy MindServer Search was to deploy globally, requiring minimal training of staff. MindServer Search's simple, intuitive interface and general ease of use allowed the firm to avoid the implementation of a training program becoming a massively complicated and expensive endeavour.
Within days of deployment, the time required to find documents and experts had dropped dramatically and overall productivity began increasing exponentially. Replacing manual processes and simple keyword search with MindServer Search prevents relevant documents from being omitted, ensuring that legal staff have access to the information they need when and how they need it. This enabled attorneys and staff to allocate more time to billable activities, thereby improving client satisfaction and service, and providing the firm with significant competitive advantage.
In addition to reducing the time needed to find documents, MindServer Search's expertise location and matter-centricity allows staff to easily search a comprehensive company-wide system containing all matters, deals, and cases, as well as locating the vast array of experience across the entirety of the firm. By indexing every employees' work product, time sheet and biography, MindServer Search enables teams to quickly and efficiently locate the expertise they require, however specific or obscure it might seem. The ability to quickly search across a variety of information sources ' e.g., time and billing systems, CRM systems, portals, internal firm matter and case databases ' provides a detailed up-to-date profile of individuals and relevant subject areas, enabling attorneys to easily and accurately locate a colleague with the required expertise.
Moving Forward
Prior to deploying MindServer Search,
Based on early successes,
The impact that MindServer Search has had on the firm has been immediate and wide reaching. In addition to making better use of existing assets and experts and greatly improving overall productivity, the firm has also improved in areas that are harder to measure, namely customer and employee satisfaction. Employees are free to service clients, staff is free to support attorneys, and the KM and IT teams can focus on improving the network, not merely maintaining it. In a matter of months, the firm has been transformed from 22 disparate offices into one integrated, consistent organization. That kind of freedom resonates throughout the entire company.
Tom Baldwin is Chief Knowledge Officer at
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