Law Firms

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Vendors and Service Providers

audience

Landscape Article

Evaluation Framework

Requirements Template

Business Case

Competitive Analysis

Pilot Guide

Thought Leadership

Buyers Guide

content type

Explore

Implement

Procure

phase

From

date

Law Firms - 500+ lawyers

Law Firms - 20-99 lawyers

Law Firms - 100-499 Lawyers

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Bankruptcy and Restructuring

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Practical Guidance

Online legal research solutions have evolved in sophistication, with many now including analytics capabilities and utilizing artificial intelligence to improve results and relevancy. In addition to the longstanding major players such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, the market for online research tools is now crowded with additional practice area- and market-specific solutions that provide more targeted intelligence. As these resources are necessarily limited by jurisdictional relevancy, each region requires its own solutions. Legaltech Hub currently only covers the following regions: US, UK, Canada, Australia. Over time, this content will be built out to cover additional regions.

Legal Research

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