Legal firmsare facing up to an
explosion in the number of electronic documents related to case
work in the past 10 years.
A decade ago, few lawyers were using e-mail for business
communications, but today almost all case information and documents
are exchanged electronically, said Dai Davis, partner at legal firm
Brooke North.
Finding information from many different collections and sources,
both internally and externally, has become increasingly difficult
and one of the biggest challenges facing lawyers in the information
age.
This is particularly true of international law firms that
typically have thousands of lawyers needing to search and access
tens of millions of documents spread over multiple storage systems
within the organisation.
Law firm Linklaters already has 25 million documents in its data
stores, and expects to produce another 1.8 million the coming
year.
Global challenges
Faced with the challenge of searching and accessing these
documents, Linklaters has joined many of its peers among the
growing ranks of global organisations implementing enterprise
search platforms.
These platforms are commonly marketed as e-discovery tools and
document or content management systems.
They enable large, information intensive organisations such as
international law firms to search, manage and retrieve information
stored in internal and external data repositories.
Research firm Gartner says these systems cut the cost, time and
risks associated with gathering information.
Such systems automatically index and categorise data and provide
a single search interface that works across multiple systems,
databases and knowledge repositories such as library catalogues and
online legal resources to provide lawyers with the most relevant
answers to searches in a matter of minutes.
Enterprise search suppliers report that legal firms make up the
biggest number of customers, followed by corporate legal
departments, pharmaceutical companies, large corporates and the
media industry.
Large international firms make up the bulk of the legal
customers because of the volume of documents typically handled by
these organisations said Simon Price, UK sales director at
enterprise search and categorisation software supplier
Recommind.
Price said because law firms are extremely document orientated,
the uptake of enterprise search systems has been rapid since first
introduced in 2006.
The most obvious business benefit to legal firms are cost
savings by improving productivity.
"Making all documents instantly available has greatly increased
productivity and freed up physical storage spaces," said Dave
Bennet, associate director at Linklaters.
Return on investment
Firms that have recently implemented search systems said that
saving just one or two minutes a day per lawyer enables a return on
investment within three to four months.
International law firm Norton Rose expects to save £500,000 a
year by cutting the time spent searching for documents by a
third.
Law firms now routinely scan paper documents, spurring the
growth of document stores. But with the aid of enterprise search
systems, law firms are finding business benefits by providing staff
global access to information, in contrast with the past, when only
local teams would have had access to certain collections of
data.
Other less obvious business benefits include the ability to bid
for new business and attract top-flight legal graduates.
Simmons and Simmons, for example, is using a
legal-industry-specific add-on to locate experts in particular
legal areas throughout the firms international offices to assemble
specialised teams.
Field Fisher Waterhouse reports improved ability to attract
graduates with the deployment of its enterprise search system.
"Now that the 'Google generation' is entering the workplace,
having a good information management system is helping attract and
support recent entrants to the profession," said the firm's
knowledge management director, Jane Bradbury.
Enterprise search suppliers predict adoption rates will continue
to climb in 2008, with demand already filtering down to smaller
companies as well as the top 100 law firms.
Gartner supports this view, but also predicts a proliferation of
suppliers. Tom Eid, research vice-president at Gartner, said, "As
we move into a high growth market, expect new supplier entrants and
non-traditional competitors to participate through technology
partnerships and acquisitions."