Law Firm Introduces Search Enterprise

At the Butler Group Search Enterprise Event this week Duncan Ogilvy from the Mills & Reve law firm described his experience of introducing enterprise search to his company. The M&R law firm decided to invest in search enterprise to limit the time that their lawyers had to spend searching for relevant documents. After discovering that M&R staff collectively spent 600 days a year searching for electronic documents and an additional 400 days searching for emails. Overall M&R discovered that they were losing on average 1800 days a year on wasted staff time; spent simply searching for information.

M&R were using Mercury to manage their data which was a homebuilt, slow and often unreliable particularly in regards to document management search. Their other system was Felix search; although Felix was working well for the company it was proving expensive to maintain. What they needed was a cross repository search facility that would not require effort or expertise from their users which have varying degrees of IT proficiency.

Having discovered that an investment into knowledge management would prove to be both time and cost effective M&R employed an agency to design and install a system to work specifically for their business. They were given a federated search system that allowed them to securely access documents from multiple repositories both online and from their own SharePoint. The search enterprise system also improved their data security as users use individual logins that only allow them to view documents according to their access level; something they had never addressed before.

One of the additional features of the M&R data management system is their ‘Experience Locator’ which allows staff to search for employees with the relevant experience. This provides the user with the lawyer’s profile including details of specific projects they have worked on and related documents.

This flexible search technology was easily integrated into their business allowing M&R to replace Felix search without users requiring additional computer skills. It now makes sharing knowledge and relevant documents easier as the engine works hard to provide the most relevant search results for the firm’s lawyers and has left Duncan Ogilvy the company’s Knowledge Management Partner a very happy man with all of his following requirements fulfilled.

• Data security
• Relevant results and concept searching
• Time saving & cost effective
• Skills and Experience Locator
• Ease of use and easy implementation
• Replace Felix search
• Federated Search (Internal and External sources)

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