Leading Swiss law firm Walder Wyss has rolled out iManage Knowledge Unlocked, meaning it now has a better understanding of how members of the firm are using its knowledge management system, what searches they are carrying out, and where the gaps are in their library, which looks set to inform the firm’s knowledge management strategy.
Knowledge Unlocked was made available by iManage this summer and productises RAVN AI, which Walder Wyss has been using in various forms since the beginning of 2019. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, legal engineer and head of KM Urs Bracher said: “What’s new to us is the analytics module and we can see how the user numbers are; who are the most active users; what content is looked for most often; and even what content is missing, where searches do not lead to results.”
Walder Wyss uses knowledge management plugin T3 from LexSoft, which allows firms to classify their iManage documents by multiple taxonomies, ensuring that data is cleaned up and tagged, helping the shift from retrieval search to knowledge search.
Bracher said: “The analytics show that the total number of users are higher than expected. Initially, having worked with a folder system, users didn’t quite know how to navigate the taxonomy-based interface and we were concerned that user acceptance might be low, but the analytics show us that acceptance is high. We can see the terms they are searching for and what they are finding, which helps us to develop our knowledge management strategy.”
Data regarding what documents and knowledge are not being accessed is helping the firm to assess how documents can be refined: rather than relying on anecdotal evidence about what knowledge assets its professionals find most valuable, the knowledge management team at Walder Wyss is now able to use data to determine how people are using the system.
Walder Wyss has around 340 employees, of which 240 are attorneys, spread across six locations (Zurich, Bern, Basel, Lausanne, Geneva and Lugano.) Since going live on Knowledge Unlocked earlier this year, Walder Wyss has rolled it out to all six of its offices. Eventually, there will be nearly 300 users who will use the iManage solution to search and access more than 7,000 knowledge assets within the knowledge management system, and several million documents within iManage Work.
iManage Knowledge Unlocked leverages some of the learning from big RAVN knowledge enterprise projects at Linklaters and Sidley Austin. It is powered by the RAVN Knowledge Graph, which surfaces connections between people, expertise and knowledge and gives users seven ways to search across iManage Work and other systems:
Search and find (Searches across all connected internal and external sources)
Expert locator (To find people/content and billing data)
Matter locator (To help you find matters, content and billing data)
Recommendations – (Recommended content based on your user profile)
Knowledge locator – (The ability to search for internal and external curated knowledge)
Clause locator – (Internal and external clauses)
Deal locator – (Curated historical deals)
Walder Wyss is now looking to integrate additional internal and external sources into Knowledge Unlocked, such as expert search, in order to more easily pinpoint legal expertise across the firm.
Other firms to recently announce that they are using iManage RAVN for knowledge management include Womble Bond Dickinson, which is also using LexSoft T3 and has around 13,000 documents indexed at last count.
“Knowledge is only as good as your users’ ability to tap into it,” Nick Thomson, general manager RAVN at iManage said in a statement today (14 October). “Walder Wyss’ usage of Knowledge Unlocked enables them to truly leverage their work product and enhance the effectiveness of their curated knowledge assets, allowing them to continually improve knowledge management processes and outcomes for their users.”
This demo from iManage ConnectLive is a helpful insight into how iManage and T3 are working together on the curation of data and taxonomies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbwIYdtr_B0&list=UUME4ujRtiioK9c48R0HyZgQ&index=1
Here is our write up of the launch of Knowledge Unlocked: https://legaltechnology.com/imanage-to-unveil-trio-of-new-offerings-at-4000-inaugural-virtual-connectlive-conference/