We speak with Carol Aldridge, head of knowledge management at Burges Salmon; Carlos García-Egocheaga, CEO at Lexsoft Systems; and Jack Shepherd, principal business consultant at iManage.
Burges Salmon is set to complete the roll out of iManage Knowledge Unlocked in March, in a quickly delivered project that has seen the UK top 50 law firm undertake extensive work behind the scenes in tidying up and classifying its data.
Burges Salmon will be using the iManage Insight knowledge search interface and Lexsoft T3 – a taxonomy and curation workflow product from iManage partner, Lexsoft Systems.
The Bristol headquartered law firm, which made the decision to move to the iManage Cloud in 2020, selected Knowledge Unlocked in July 2022 after an evaluation of other systems in the market. It previously used a system from Gate West New Media that it selected in 2008. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Burges Salmon’s head of knowledge management, Carol Aldridge, said: “We were very pleased with that system, it worked well, but obviously technology has been moving on. We have a really nice focus now on curation, and that’s the bit that was missing in the days when AI was the big new thing. Curation is key, and iManage recognises that.”
Aldridge and her project team are working on the implementation with Jack Shepherd, principal business consultant at iManage, and Carlos García-Egocheaga, CEO at Lexsoft Systems.
Shepherd said: “What’s been really great in working with Carol and her team is that they get the importance of tidying up your content first, which is something that we’re super focused on. We’ve worked with Carlos and his team a lot. A few years ago the expectation was that you could stick a solution like this over some bad, messy content and expect people to suddenly be able to find things. While there might be some marginal improvements, it’s really the combination of the technology and tidying up the data and classifying it properly that delivers the success that we’ve seen at Burges Salmon.”
It is not uncommon for lawyers to struggle with uncurated knowledge systems in which it is hard to find recommended content. Aldridge said: “Fishing in a general document management system where you have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of items is quite dangerous in terms of finding starting points. How do you know what the context is? How do you know if it was a heavily negotiated document, or something that is suitable to use to add value for the client that you’re working for today?” While pointing out that lawyers of course receive supervision, she says: “What we’re trying to do is to get to a cleaned up curated recommended document as a starting point.”
iManage uses a tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) algorithm – a weighting system in document search and information retrieval based on the frequency of words. Shepherd says: “The importance of doing that metadata exercise and the data clean up, having things categorised neatly, is that the more metadata you put on the content in your knowledge system, the more you have to manipulate that search.”
He adds: “A common request is whether we can make firm-approved templates appear higher up the list than any other type of content, and we can do that kind of stuff with our search, which is one of the reasons that it is so powerful.”
Describing the work done on taxonomies, where the firm has introduced legal document types as well as knowledge types, Aldridge said: “Four PSLs are doing the really hard yards with the taxonomies and mapping a process so that the wider PSL group can see how to do it.
“To start with, it was like a different language. They have developed their own ways of explaining things to each other now, and it’s just brilliant seeing what the value of that is. Talking to each other and collaborating isn’t easy, but it is really, really valuable.”
Shepherd adds: “Our first task is often trying to convince people that organising things in folders is not as good as organising things using metadata. One of the great things about this project was that Carol and her team understood that pretty quickly.”
In addition to enabling users to find recommended content, Knowledge Unlocked provides analytics in terms of how the firm is using the KM system. García-Egocheaga said: “If, for example, you find a taxonomy with no documents, it either means we went too far in creating the taxonomy or there’s a gap in the information. We can inform the knowledge department how long it takes to complete searches and whether anything is missing.”
Within each legal team at Burges Salmon there is a knowledge management partner and a PSL. Adridge said: “We’ll be sharing the analytics results on a quarterly basis so they can understand how their teams are behaving as well as how we might be able to develop the system to provide them with more support. Analytics are absolutely critical on all sides of the implementation.”
Hybrid working represents more challenges around knowledge sharing and Aldridge is looking at different ways to facilitate conversations. In Knowledge Unlocked you can see who contributed an item and talk to them about it, with Aldridge observing: “It’s all about enabling people to interact around knowledge, not just seal themselves off in their home working environments.”
It will be a while before Burges Salmon moves to the SaaS version of iManage, but Aldridge says that Knowledge Unlocked – itself a SaaS solution – will help pave the way.
Because it is a SaaS solution, it requires standardisation, and García-Egocheaga said: “We give you six to seven different workflows and you choose the one you want, but everything is standardised so that you always work in the same way. The reduction is very important.”
Shepherd adds: “The big shift for us is that with on premises projects, people have got very used to running scripts in the background and tinkering with the HTML to make things different. That’s not going to be possible as much in SaaS; the paradigm has shifted. It’s going to be all done through a control panel. You can’t customise stuff, but you can configure it and ultimately that means you’re going to end up with a much more resilient, scalable product that multiple people are feeding into and that’s easier to support from our perspective as well. We’ve got one product to support instead of lots of mini products.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com