By Joe Campbell, Product Manager, iManage
Knowledge is not a static asset. And for organizations like law firms, professional services entities, legal departments, and others where know-how and knowledge is the work product they are trading on, it’s critical to be able to find, access, and act on the ever-increasing stores of collective knowledge with speed and accuracy. It’s that knowledge, and the many insights it provides, that enable organizations to be successful in serving their clients, put best-practices into play, get to the data that helps them negotiate and win cases, and create a competitive advantage.
It’s become common for lawyers to navigate through thousands of cases or matters when searching for lawyers with specific expertise or knowledge, documents or matters that can answer their questions about law, transactions, regulatory matters, judges, investors, clients, or industries. It’s often a question of where they go, and how can they best surface what they need, when they need it when knowledge and know-how is hidden deep within documents and systems.
Doing so can mean filtering through multiple business systems and seemingly unrelated results to find the information they need, then aggregating the information, taking time and energy that could be better spent providing legal advice.
Many organizations have established a solid start to their knowledge management (KM) efforts by developing curated knowledge banks of documents about matters stored in their document management systems (DMS). This helps identify best-in-class documents and data that can be repurposed across clients and industries, saving time and money. And with sophisticated, relational, contextual search like that delivered through iManage Knowledge Unlocked powered by RAVN, KM can be continued to be wielded as an even more strategic tool.
iManage helps organizations to gain insight from their data through solutions that combine artificial intelligence and machine learning with document management. These automated solutions streamline access to information and remove the burden of having to dedicate time and effort to repetitive, manual searches that are often error-prone and end up burning through time without delivering desired results.
Recently, iManage announced a new partnership with Foundation Software Group, developer of next-generation software solutions for law firms, to address the challenge of searching, finding, and leveraging critical information housed across multiple, disparate enterprise systems.
Streamlined Integration
As part of the partnership, an integration between Knowledge Unlocked’s machine learning capabilities and Foundation’s rich comprehensive metadata gleaned from information from disparate systems has been developed. Foundation’s data feeds into Knowledge Unlocked’s powerful Knowledge Graph, allowing Knowledge Unlocked to securely deliver search results with increased relevancy, contextual accuracy, and speed.
The combined solution fuels rich connections between content, people, data and context, lawyers, legal teams and other professionals to shave valuable time off the search process through a single search functionality that provides more unified, targeted results along with deeper insights.
The integration accelerates the ability to zero in on the right information at the right time, improving performance and driving better decision-making. the combined solution breaks down data silos across organizations to unlock critical information and produce actionable insights for users.
Delivered through a connector, the integration benefits mutual customers with a streamlined, easy-to-deploy solution, decreasing the time required for deployment and speeding time-to-value.
More Than A Connector
The iManage and Foundation combination simplifies the ability to surface connections between content, concepts, and people to identify hidden experts, similar matters, and best-practice content faster. This happens by capturing additional context and metadata around matters that may not be directly available in time, billing, new business intake or documentation information.
This added context, in combination with the powerful search tools, enhances the value of results because it uses key content from the experience management system and surfaces those insights within a single search. End users will be able to search across multiple systems with a single query, and then see comprehensive results, regardless of the source system, addressing the challenges of working across multiple enterprise applications.
Easier Search With Better Results
The metadata from Foundation makes the search function in iManage more powerful. For example, once a matter is uploaded into iManage Work, the market-leading email and Document Management System, users are able to access details like who’s worked on it, the previous matters it references, and other descriptive information that is captured in Foundation’s Experience Management Platform and stored as metadata in Knowledge Unlocked. This enriched metadata and contextual information transforms the search function into a more powerful tool for delivering accurate results to the user.
Having this metadata combined with iManage Knowledge Unlocked also makes it possible to conduct a search for things like all contracts that have a particular value and that are associated with a certain matter or are from a specific practice area. Thus, the search results are of higher accuracy, more contextual, and more relevant.
Quicker Time To Value
A preconfigured connector means a significantly decreased deployment time, taking only a couple of clicks to get the connection up and running. Plus, utilizing standard connectors allows mutual customers to leverage their existing investment, eliminating the need for complex and timely professional services. Aligning on the data schema and data fields translates to a path to immediate value.
Simplified Implementation and Support
This partnership integrates processes, so customers don’t have to worry about working with or managing two vendors. For example, during implementation users can access Foundation’s content in the iManage content library and can contact iManage for support or to get answers to questions. Knowledge workers never need to think about who to reach out to for assistance. There is one source of truth. One vendor to work with.
Beyond productized connectors, iManage and Foundation combine to simplify the process of integrating Foundation’s rich information into the iManage Knowledge Unlocked solution. Unlock a host of shared knowledge across your firm or enterprise while achieving significant time savings for firm professionals. Contact us to learn more, or to schedule a demo.
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[ Artificial Lawyer is proud to bring you this sponsored thought leadership article by iManage. ]