Transatlantic law firm Womble Bond Dickinson has rolled out a new knowledge management application using the iManage RAVN search engine to unlock greater insights into its people, financial centric data, and associated relationships.
The firm is a long standing user of iManage Work, has replaced IDOL and is using RAVN’s machine learning technology to extract and analyse unstructured data regardless of location, to better understand search queries and to provide relevant search results quickly.
The firm says that it has received positive user feedback about RAVN’s search user interface and UX that delivers easier searching capabilities. Over the coming year, the firm expects to take advantage of more advanced aspects of RAVN, including automatic identification of how its US and UK locations work together to further help it further simplify financial operations.
“We see immense potential in the way iManage RAVN can bring together data from time and billing systems, fee earner biographies, work product history, and other pieces of information to help surface experts and expertise across the organisation,” said Paul Harvey, head of knowledge management and legal training at Womble Bond Dickinson. “Harnessing that hidden knowledge will enable us to work more efficiently and better serve our clients.”
“Our firm has never put into practice a search system this powerful,” added Bill Koch, chief knowledge officer at Womble Bond Dickinson (US) LLP. “The fact that our lawyers can so quickly locate material knowledge and, in turn, make that knowledge actionable is a game changer – both in how we operate internally and in how we serve our clients.”
Speaking at ILTA Insight in London on the topic of using AI in knowledge management, global RAVN product lead Alex Smith said: “Search has come along a hell of a lot in five years and we can start to make search contextual so we can say, ‘Here is the best practice at the point of need.’”
Linklaters recently unveiled MatterExplorer, its long awaited RAVN powered search and knowledge management system, which it says reduces search time for the firm’s 750,000 legal documents from hours to seconds. Other firms to use RAVN for within knowledge management include Magic Circle giant Allen & Overy and UK top 100 law firm Howard Kennedy.
