iManage has entered a strategic partnership and integration with Foundation Software Group to make it easier for firms to deploy its knowledge management system iManage Knowledge Unlocked and surface curated connections between content, concepts and people.
Foundation is a law firm intelligence platform that helps firms to aggregate and organise their often scattered and siloed data. Nick Thomson, general manager for iManage RAVN, told Legal IT Insider that iManage has built not only a Foundation connector, but also adjusted its implementation process to deploy common best practice methods. He commented: “It’s so much easier to deploy and in effect it’s all coming out of the box preset.”
Foundation helps law firms to present matter profiles for experience and expertise and that data is available to the iManage knowledge graph, which identifies the strengths of connections. Thomson said: “We’re not just federating search we’re pulling Foundation data into the index and combining it with all the other extracted contract information using RAVN. It’s very powerful.”
The integration is expected to enable people to more easily uncover hidden experts, similar matters, and best practice content.
“The integration between iManage and Foundation allows law firms to quickly leverage their data for the practice and business of law,” said Cindy Thurston Bare, VP, customer product management at Foundation Software Group in a release out today (19 October). “Together, we unlock a host of shared knowledge across firms while achieving significant time savings for firm professionals. Our solutions are highly complementary, and we see significant opportunity for deeper integration to deliver actionable intelligence to our joint customers.”
In the same release, Thomson said “Our goal with Knowledge Unlocked is to significantly reduce the complexity and risk traditionally associated with deploying legal knowledge solutions. That sensibility is also reflected in the iManage partnership with Foundation. We go far beyond the development of productised connectors to leverage a shared vision of simplifying the process for mutual clients to integrate Foundation’s rich information into the Knowledge Unlocked solution.”
Thomson says that iManage will continue to build its ecosystem, commenting: “We are applying the best of technology to legal knowledge so firms don’t have to stitch it together themselves.”
He adds: “Enterprise search has moved on from being about connecting different sources to using machine learning to curate that content.”