Search Desktop, Enterprise - or Beyond - With LexisNexis® Total Search Suite
By Gayle Lynn-Nelson
LexisNexis® Total Search is a Knowledge Management tool that lets you take advantage of the collective knowledge that resides in your firm’s document management repository as well as in outside resources. Find relevant prior work product, such as case-law memos, briefs, motions filed, pleadings, depositions, deal documents, etc., to help complete a research or drafting assignment.
There is a lot of buzz in KM circles about the need for an enterprise search. Imagine … one search to find existing pleadings, depositions, memos, deal documents and motions written by in-firm experts, together with cases and codes, news and business sources, analytical content, and the authoritative verification of Shepard’s® Citations Service. Plus you can do all of this and more through the familiar lexis.com® user interface. Whether the document was created yesterday or last year, down the hall or in your London office, LexisNexis Total Search makes it readily available and useable.
Focus on Prior Work Product or Add Applications and DMS
Let’s define enterprise search: It is the ability to find information across an organization. It is rooted in information retrieval, something we librarians excel at and fully understand. As we know, information retrieval is a discipline that focuses on developing frameworks to represent documents, queries and their relationships.
LexisNexis Total Search represents a new generation of search technology, and is capable of searching the desktop, enterprise and/or beyond with one simple interface tailored to the user. In other words, if the firm’s need centers on work-product retrieval, LexisNexis Total Search can be developed for that purpose alone.
However, the architecture of LexisNexis Total Search includes much more flexibility. LexisNexis Total Search Enterprise lets your firm add a federated search with public content and an internal-only search with firm content, including sources such as SQL applications, Exchange, Lotus Notes®, etc.
Even add document management system (DMS) profiling to the firm’s knowledge-management capabilities with the LexisNexis Total Search Suite. This is revolutionary in the field of Knowledge Management.
With LexisNexis Total Search you can:
- Locate previously unavailable internal firm work product with surprising speed using familiar LexisNexis search tools.
- Focus in on all relevant prior work product needed to complete a research or drafting assignment.
- Verify that prior work product still represents good law with real-time Shepard’s Signal™ indicators embedded in internal documents. Click and link to the full Shepard’s report. It creates a “living document.”
- “Supercharge” your internal documents with links that let you move quickly between internal and external documents.
- Conserve time spent on training because LexisNexis Total Search is available through lexis.com. There is virtually no learning curve.
Start on Firmer Ground with Better Document Profiling
Each year, attorneys generate thousands of documents that must be archived for future reference. As we all know, law firms typically use a DMS to accomplish this task. Document profiling enhances the value of a law firm’s document collection by profiling and classifying documents automatically, making them available for reference and re-use on demand. It also identifies documents that require special security measures; identifies and eliminates duplicate work product; and allows accounting and leadership personnel to track trends across profile data to provide insights into individual, practice area and firm performance.
This is exactly the type of tool any Knowledge Manager needs to help their attorneys be more productive and responsive to clients and free them to pursue more profitable work.
Though a DMS offers an effective means of storing work product, most are notoriously inefficient at locating and retrieving individual files. One reason is that document management systems rely on the end-users—attorneys and other legal professionals—to classify and “profile” the documents they create. We often do users a disservice by offering them a confusing array of classification options. If users fail to provide sufficient or accurate input about a document’s characteristics, that document is likely to be assigned to a miscellaneous category within a DMS or filed with unrelated items, making it difficult to locate and retrieve in the future.
The challenge of locating and retrieving files efficiently led LexisNexis to develop a solution called Document Profiling, part of the LexisNexis Total Search Suite. This product uses a powerful, scalable engine—one that combines complex linguistic-analysis algorithms, search technology, LexisNexis legal intelligence and professional services expertise—to automatically standardize and enhance the profiles of documents that exist both within LexisNexis Total Search and the firm DMS.
Once profiles within a document collection are improved, the technology can be used to reclassify each document according to established criteria, making work product accessible almost instantly. Document Profiling can also categorize new documents automatically to eliminate the chance that they will be lost or misclassified in a firm’s document management system.
Any law firm will state that the ultimate goal is to assign only relevant metadata. Missing, or incorrect, metadata is a significant problem that can prevent relevant results from being returned. The LexisNexis Total Search Suite, including Document Profiling, ensures your metadata is relevant and up-to-date, maximizing your search capability across the enterprise.
