The Law Firm Intranet

The KM Peer Group’s 3rd program of the day included a look at three firms implementation of enterprise (or universal) search.

O’Melveny & Meyers

Jeff Rovner from O’Melveny & Meyers led off with their implementation of Recommind.  He started out by using the Long Tail analogy as described in the book with the same title by Chris Anderson. 

Forgive my impromptu drawing – this is close to what he showed:

Jeff described most KM systems that we put in place as being systems that gather and allow for the retrieval of the hot or popular items.  At the same time the obscure items may provide real value some times.   Similar to the items on Amazon that sell often (hot or popular) to the items that sell infrequently (obscure).  Those items are still of value (at Amazon they make up 33% of the revenue) and are not available to anyone using a traditional KM system. 

Using Recommind, O’Melveny is able to provide access to both, whatever system they many reside in – their DMS, HR, FInancial or New Matter systems.  They prove search, browse and filtering of the results.  They initially introduced search as a standalone system (outside of the intranet) but have since integrated it into their new intranet OMMni. 

The stand alone search page had a single box with the ability to search on documents, matters or people.  It also provided the scope (breadth & depth  of the collection) for the information available with each type of search.  They introduced it to the firm in a very creative way as they compared it to the Bloomingdales.com website with regard to how you can search, filter and browse through the information.

White & Case

Chad Ergun of White & Case was up next with his firm’s implementation of Autonomy.  They selected Autonomy after reviewing 4 products.   The most important features that swayed them towards their selection were:

• Language -able to search for and deliver information without dependency on one language.
• Concept based searches
• Query Guidance
• Clustering of results

There implementation also included a single search box with the abililty to search different collections including:

• Intranet
• Web
• Firm directory
• KM collection
• DMS by office (I’m guessing that since the screen shots showed the New York library.

The results are filtered as with Recommind.

The most interesting part of this presentation was the Local search that individuals were able to use that is similar to Google Desktop.  They can search locally or both locally and across the network. 

Their next project is to add WAV files to the search capabilities.

Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz

Finally, Robert Guilbert from Wachtell presented their implementation of Interwoven Universal Search.  Their implementation is similar to the others in terms of capabilities.  Those that stood out for me were:

• Spelling suggestions while entering search termsj
• Dynamic clustering of results
• Ability to filter results. 

As with O’Melveny, Wachtell’s implementation included the ability to search three collections – Documents, People and Matters.

Another great program from the KM Peer Group!

~ Nina Platt