The need for an effective search strategy

Ineffective search strategies can have a serious impact on the efficiency and competitiveness of your firm. Consider the October 2006 report from the Butler Group (http://www.butlergroup.com/) entitled Enterprise Search and Retrieval. This concluded that “ineffective search and discovery strategies are hampering business competitiveness, impairing service delivery and putting companies at risk.” Specifically, the research firm contends that as much as 10% of a company's salary costs is “frittered away,” as employees scramble to find adequate and accurate information to fulfil their roles and complete assigned tasks.

For law firms the reality can be worse than this report highlights, as information and knowledge is the bedrock of all law firms. Consider the following within your own firm:

1. 1. How long does it take fee earners to find information when they don't know where to start looking? The content they require may be in the document management system, the know how database, the library system or within an online subscription resource. It may even be available in multiple formats in multiple systems.

2. 2. When fee earners do know where to look, how much time is spent by them and support staff searching the relevant databases and asking questions of others that may have been answered already?

3. 3. What happens after the required information is located? It may be printed and filed, a link added to a favourites list on a web browser or an email sent to a colleague with the details. Finding the same information in the future can pose problems and waste time.

4. 4. Finally, how much time is spent by technical, information support and PSLs managing content and organising it so that it is easy to find?

Given the facts, the huge content volumes and the pressures surrounding effective information management and searching, I firmly believe that no organisation, and specifically no law firm can (or should attempt to) capture, organise and index all of the material that they need and use on a day to day basis. In a recent article for this journal, (7(3) p156) Adrian Dale quoted some interesting statistics as follows:

The specifics in terms of content volumes for your firm will be unique, but rest assured the volume and complexity of the information is growing at a rapid rate year on year.

Enterprise vs. Federated Search

Before you can really understand what is meant by an integrated search strategy it is best to review what is meant by the terms Enterprise and Federated search.

Traditionally, the business objective of providing users with one stop search has been approached as a content consolidation exercise. Firms purchase and deploy an enterprise search vendor's software and implement a number of distinct information feeds into the one consolidated index. Examples of such feeds include file-system and web-site spidering (crawling and indexing), e-mail public folder indexing, relational database indexing, document management system integrations and much more. This approach brings a high cost of ownership and deployment/management and, whilst providing a partial one stop search capability, it brings with it certain issues that include latency of information (the index is only as current as the last indexing crawl) and major network and infrastructure expenditure.

The impact of implementing such an enterprise level solution includes the need for application upgrades and/or complete replacement, changes to existing working practices and the management of major infrastructure process changes, including high availability and disaster recovery of the proprietary index. For these reasons major corporate content consolidation projects take many man-months and in many cases years to implement. When completed, this type of solution is never 100% comprehensive, as not all content you access can be captured and indexed in this way.

Where enterprise search solutions are implemented correctly they can have significant benefits for the organisation. However, one myth relating to enterprise search is that the content that exists in your many disparate systems cannot be effectively searched unless it is re-indexed by the new and often expensive enterprise search software. This is not always the case and a careful review of all internal systems and their existing content indexes is recommended prior to deployment of any enterprise search software.

Federated search solutions actively seek to solve the business requirement for one stop search by configuring a range of connectors to the required content, including internal databases, intranets and online services. By doing this the software can provide a single search capability to multiple content resources quickly, provided the content to be searched is indexed within the native systems. Both the cost of the initial ownership and the ongoing maintenance are relatively low, and require few changes in working practice and only small infrastructure investments. Couple this with the advantage of real-time search and no index latency and you have a potential winning solution to the one stop search requirement.

Federated search has often been described, by some IT directors in particular, as an inferior approach to solving the problems associated with delivering integrated search solutions. This is not a true reflection of what the technology is attempting to deliver. Federated search is quite different to the traditional approach that revolves around document capture and indexing. It is, in my view, an approach that complements and builds upon your existing investments in document management, enterprise search and online subscription services.

The landscape

All law firms maintain and use different systems for different purposes and this is not going to change anytime soon. Each system is designed with a specific objective in mind and, in many cases, these systems are not effectively linked together and they can be perceived as being complex or difficult to operate for the occasional user.

A not atypical law firm might have the following systems accessed by fee earners on a daily basis:

Internal:

Library, document management, know how, intranet, PMS, CRM, file systems, email etc

Online:

Subscription services such as LexisNexis, Sweet & Maxwell, Justis, PLC, Informa etc

Free legal, government and regulatory services such as the FSA, the DTI, Companies House, Inland Revenue, BAILII etc

News & current awarness services, such as The FT, The BBC, Google News etc

In some cases the different online resources that are used are competing head-to-head with competitor products in their own market. Each new release of these services adds functionality, increases content volumes and, in some cases, increases complexity for the user. Keeping pace with the changing interfaces and the different approaches is becoming more and more difficult and, however good or poor an interface, when users get used to it any change is considered to be a disruption and one that is not always appreciated.

The new breed of lawyer is much more technically aware, but for many the choice of what to use and when to use it can be daunting. The result is that they fall back on their preferred resources or, in some cases, resort to searching online with services such as Google. The results of this approach can be inconsistent at best and extremely costly for the firm at worst.

Considering Enterprise Search?

When considering an approach that relies upon content from different systems, internal and online, being captured and re-indexed it is vital to consider the following:

Considering Federated Search?

Federated search technologies are designed to sit above existing applications, databases, content indexes and web services. They support the searching of the existing indexes held within these disparate systems and return results that are consistent with those returned when searching the different systems directly. Where you have decided to re-index content from systems or websites that do not provide a useful or usable index, a federated search solution can integrate searching of this additional index with those resources that are already searchable.

When deploying a federated search solution careful consideration needs to be given to the following:

An Integrated Search Strategy

In delivering a truly Integrated Search solution you need to focus primarily on the business requirements and what fee earners need, as opposed to technology and what specific features one supplier offers over another.

Before you can start the process of designing and implementing an integrated search solution it is important that you consider the following:

• • Define the key information resources for each work group/practice area/office/ jurisdiction within your firm

• • Organise resources into different groupings/collections as appropriate to the needs of each group

• • Prioritise resources within the different groupings such that the higher value resources are accessible first

• • Simplify the search interface such that it can simultaneously search all necessary resources with minimal effort, returning results in the same order as the native resource where appropriate and possible

• • Maximise reuse of content and previous searches through effective personalisation, such as saved searches and content bookmarks and collections that can be shared across the firm.

Having considered these points, you are now ready to decide what technologies are required and how they should be deployed.

Case study

Ashurst, with a team of over 190 partners in 12 countries, is an example of a firm that has taken the bull by the horns when it comes to delivering integrated search across the firm. The solution that they have developed evolves around various collections/databases of internally managed content/know how. These resources are searched as a single entity, but the results are presented segmented by document type and office. From the results page of the internally managed resources, the ability to extend the search to incorporate specific online legal resources is provided. In the case of Ashurst the online resources are organised by type, i.e. Legislation, Case Law and Commentary. An example of the web browser interface that is presented to fee earners is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Internal Know How Results

In the above approach it is easy to see how materials from internal know how repositories are returned, grouped by type (shown on the left) and by office (individual tabs). The bottom left of the results page enables the search to be broadened to include all required online Legislation (searching by title), Case Law (searching by party name) and Commentary resources. The result is a solution that puts the fee earners in control of what they search and how they search. An example of the results from a set of external resources, including LexisNexis and CLI, is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 External resources results

At Ashurst the internal content is captured, organised and indexed using systems appropriate to this task and selected by the firm. The external search capability uses a federated approach built upon the Solcara SolSearch (http://www.solcara.com/solcara_products_Solsearch.htm) product, and the complete solution is an integral part of the firms intranet.

What does the future hold?

Content volumes will continue to expand, internal and online systems will become more sophisticated and further mergers between firms will result in a broader array of internal and online systems. Given this situation, new thinking will be required on how to deliver effective and integrated search solutions.

The semantic web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) is evolving to deliver an approach that will be adopted by more and more organisations. It aims to add meaning to content such that it can be exposed to different products. The result is the ability for content to be discovered without the need for the user to understand the underlying technologies or even specify where they wish to search. Exploiting the potential of the semantic web and applying the same approach to all internal and online information systems will in the near future deliver significant additional benefits to those organisations that embrace it.

A new generation of federated search technologies are also emerging and future knowledge management and search strategies are being reviewed as part of the EU funded X-Media project (http://www.x-media-project.org/). The outcome will be to make it possible to publish in a semantically reusable way the context of a firm's internal content along with the content itself. For example, each document in your document management system could be described in a format to make it available to services able to share and exploit semantic content. End users will no longer need to know where to search and instead simply concentrate on what to search. After all, end users care little about the technology being used to support an effective search strategy, they simply want to ensure that they find what they need from a trusted resource when they need it.