Third Time A Charm For Law Firm

Law offices have been at the forefront of the Enterprise Search market. These businesses generate a large volume of data and need to provide their users with easy access to it. Experience has been the best teacher for international law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP: the firm went through three Enterprise Search systems before finally finding one that meets its needs.

Bracewell & Giuliani, which has 450 attorneys and 900 employees worldwide, has domestic offices in Connecticut, New York, Texas, and Washington D.C, as well as international sites in Dubai, London, and Kazakhstan. The company, which focuses on energy and financial corporate law, now has about 70T bytes of data, up from approximately 4T bytes five years ago.

The corporation's first search system was deployed more than two decades ago. "Our Open Text system did a good job of helping attorneys search for information housed in their own documents," explained C Kirk Scruggs CIO at Bracewell & Giuliani. However, lawyers in each office had their own document libraries, so it was hard to search across the enterprise for information. Also, the attorneys could search by key word only and wanted more flexible search criteria.

Near the turn of the millennium, the company deployed Autonomy's Enterprise Search system. The product had a wider reach than the Open Text system but still fell short of users' desires because it could not easily input data from law firm specific applications.

Aware that the attorneys were unhappy, Scruggs was on the lookout for another search system and saw a demonstration of Recommind's MindServer in the summer of 2006. The law firm then held a "beauty contest" and examined a handful of other products: Thomas Reuters' West KM, LexisNexis' Total Search, and Microsoft's SharePoint.In the fall of 2006, Bracewell & Giuliani decided to go with the Recommind solution. "Lawyers categorize data by clients: after engaging with a client, they generate billing data, create time entries, and produce emails related to the client and any associated contacts," explained Scruggs. When a lawyer entered a phrase, the Recommind system would bring up appropriate documents as well the people who created them and related items, such as time sheet entries. Another plus was the Recommind system was able to index and search SharePoint information.

Such features were available with the other products but implementing them would have required a lot of customization and a large amount (six digits) of consulting charges. Most of the functions were available out of the box with MindServer. 

So the law firm began its implementation in the fall of 2006. "Since Recommind knew a lot about law firm applications and had hooks into our primary applications, the deployment went fairly smooth," explained Scruggs.

The company did need to tweak a few items. The user interface had to be tailored to Bracewell & Giuliani's liking. Also, the firm had to make sure that the system assigned the proper levels of security and confidentiality to privileged documents. The search system also needed to be able to make a distinction between personal documents and company correspondences. Last, the servers supporting the search database had to be expanded, so they could support the processing load.

The implementation process was finished in February 2007 and came with a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars (Scruggs did not want to get any more specific about the spending). The investment quickly started to generate dividends. Internal business processes were streamlined. Now, information, such as attorney profiles, accounting data, document information, and time sheets, were all available in one system, so they could be searched quickly and easily.In a law firm, time is money, and the new system enables lawyers to spend less time fruitlessly searching for information and more time interacting with clients. Expertise is also important in this market segment. "Previously, lawyers would send out emails asking for individuals familiar with particular areas, say international bond trading," explained Scruggs. "With Recommend, they can search for that expertise online, and usually they find a number of people who can help."

Throughout his tenure, Scruggs has spent a lot of time listening to employees complain about the inadequacies found with the company's enterprise search systems. Now, they finally have something else to talk about with him.