International law firmNorton Roseexpects to save £500,000 a
year by introducing an integrated search engine to improve
knowledge sharing between 2,000 users across 24 offices in 20
countries.
The search engine was developed using enterprise search
technology from
Fast. The firm chose Fast after testing a shortlist of four
competing systems for their ability to integrate searches of
internal and external information sources.
"Time spent searching for information is expected to be reduced
by a third, saving costs to our clients and enabling our lawyers to
be more productive and efficient. We valued these savings at half a
million pounds a year," said Amber Rennie, knowledge development
manager at Norton Rose.
The firm's aim was to develop a system that would deliver
relevant results including highlighted key words and used Fast
technology to customise searches.
"Our old search engine could only sort the results by date or
relevance and sometimes the results had no obvious relevance at all
to the search criteria," said Ann Halpern, director of practice and
organisational management at Norton Rose.
The Norton Rose team built the graphical user interface for the
system and included a number of customised filters such as practice
group and precedents to enable users to refine their searches.
The Fast technology also enabled the system to search in a range
of languages for the first time, including traditional and simple
Chinese.