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Matter Management

Business of Law solutions support all of the aspects of running a law firm other than the substantive practice of law. This is therefore a broad category, covering processes from client intake and management to timekeeping and billing, matter management, budgeting and pricing of matter work, email management, records management, information governeance and so on. Many of these processes are administrative and repetitive, lending themselves well to automation. The range of solutions in this category means a large number of vendors are represented, with certain behemoths such as Intapp and Aderant straddling many capabilities. In small and mid-sized law firms, practice management systems act as platform solutions that enable all aspects of the business of law. Clio is the leading practice management system for mid-sized law, incorporating many integrated products that extend its native capabilities.

Business of Law

Knowledge Management solutions provide for the collection, curation, tagging, organization and delivery of knowledge content (including precedent documents, forms, checklists, guides, and other critical legal content) across a legal organization. Classic knowledge management tools include knowledge hubs / precedent libraries and other content repositories, as well as intranet platforms, enterprise search and experience management solutions. Content repositories may include clause banks, such as Litera Create - Content, and directories of external data, such as Courtroom Insight. The market for enterprise search is narrow in legal, with Opentext's Decisiv Search and iManage Knowledge Unlocked vying for market share. Foundation&rsquo;s experience management platform &ndash; another Litera product &ndash; provides the ability to store and connect information about a legal organization&rsquo;s clients, matters and people, therefore enabling a firm to leverage its intellectual capital effectively and better cross-sell work. SharePoint has long been the established platform for intranet systems, with their online offering introducing greater flexibility. Handshake by Aderant, HighQ, Infodash are solid competitors.

Knowledge Management

Firms often keep directories to track information about local counsel, judges, expert witnesses, and more. The most useful of these directories tie the listed individuals to the matters in which they were involved, enabling others in the firm to identify and reach out to lawyers who have prior experience retaining an expert or local counsel, or appearing before a relevant judge. In relation to expert witnesses, directories can also provide links to relevant articles and expertise. Directories can minimize "PTI" - pardon the interruption - emails that are sent to all timekeepers and interrupt work. External directory solutions, such as Courtroom Insight, have built additional value through integrations with docketing and legal research companies, enabling them to provide rich information on a firm's use of related professionals in legal matters.

Directories

In large law firms, it can be difficult for lawyers and other professionals to know who has what expertise or experience. This lack of connectedness can become problematic when lawyers are looking for assistance with a niche area of practice, wish to internally cross-sell work for a client, or find a lawyer who is admitted to practice in a particular jurisdiction. It’s also difficult for business development professionals and partners who need to put together pitches based on prior experience. Experience management systems solve these problems by providing a single place in which to store, manage, access and share information about professional expertise, educational background and bar admission. The leading solution is Foundation, now part of the Litera stable, with competitors including Ikaun and Pitchly.

Experience Management

An intranet provides a central location for content related to an organization, allowing for the consolidation of useful resources and the organization and delivery of critical information. Intranets are frequently used to house workplace policies and to explain administrative processes. They often provide the entry point for learning systems and links to other resources, such as knowledge bases. In law firms, intranets can be integrated with enterprise search, matter and experience management platforms, and document management systems, allowing for a one-stop shop that gives an overview of a lawyer's work, including WIP and financials, and access to matters and documents. Traditionally, SharePoint has been the most common legal industry platform for intranets, often enhanced with products such as Handshake and BA Insight, though some are now breaking away and using alternative solutions such as HighQ’s publishing function.

Intranet

All effective knowledge or information delivery systems are underpinned by a good taxonomy, or classification system. As the ability to leverage data across systems becomes increasingly important for both law firms and in-house departments, so does the management of taxonomies across those systems. Taxonomy management tools work in two ways – either to manage organization-wide taxonomies, enabling the organization to maintain consistency and control over its data, or to manage taxonomies and tagging within a single system. Lexsoft’s T3, for example, provides the ability to tag knowledge content from stored taxonomy lists before it is pulled into a single knowledge delivery system such as enterprise search. By contrast, Synaptica is a solution that allows for the organization and management of taxonomies across multiple systems.

Taxonomy Management

Precedents

Unlike knowledge hubs, which primarily store entire documents, clause banks allow for the storage, organization, curation and management of clauses or provisions. This is particularly helpful for specialist practices, such as tax and employment, which work by reviewing existing documents and inserting relevant clauses. In a clause bank, these practices create libraries of clauses with folder structures and taxonomy tags that enable lawyers to rapidly identify the right content to add to a document. Some clause banks, such as Litera Content Companion, provide capabilities such as auto-redaction and the ability to automatically break down a document into its composite clauses. It is also common for sophisticated clause banks, including Content Companion and Syntheia, to offer contemporaneous clause recommendations during drafting. A recent competitor is Lexis Create, though this is currently a UK-focused product.

Clause Bank

A knowledge base provides a central location for teams or organizations to share knowledge content (mainly documents). Sophisticated knowledge hub solutions also deliver (1) workflows to support the curation of content, (2) tools to help organize content, such as the ability to manage and house taxonomies, customize filters, generate browse trees, develop discrete collections of related content, and trigger knowledge management workflows for administrators, and (3) search tools to optimize the findability of knowledge content. Traditional knowledge bases have frequently been built on software platforms such as SharePoint, used in combination with solutions such as Handshake. Newer market entrants include Syntheia and Intelllex.

Knowledge Base

Enterprise search solutions are classic knowledge management tools, allowing for a unified search across muliple systems / repositories of both structured and unstructured data in an organization. These solutions are powerful because they allow timekeepers to easily find information about a firm's people, matters, documents and more through one interface. Choice of document management system to some extent determines which enterprise search system a firm might use. Decisiv Search had long been considered the major player in legal enterprise search, but after acquisition by Opentext it has lost some market share to&nbsp; the iManage product, Knowledge Unlocked, which is underpinned by AI technology and offers predictive capabilities. These two are by no means the only options for firms, however. Sinequa is used by a number of large firms, as is the federated search product BA Insight, which can enhance SharePoint's search capabilities and is often the platform of choice for firms that use NetDocuments for document management. Finnish company Ilves offers Search, a powerful solution that also operates in English and is in use across at least two large international firms. More recent developments include targeted neural network and advanced AI searches such as Casetext's AllSearch (now subsumed within CoCounsel), and DeepJudge. Although these are not enterprise search solutions, they provide many potential use cases for firms seeking to identify needles in a haystack in large document sets.

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