Smarter Search: How DLA Piper Connect Drives Efficiency ... · outside of the intranet through some...

September 2012

Connect ► Find ► Act

Smarter Search:

How DLA Piper

Drives Efficiency

with Search Based

Applications

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Faced with information management and search

challenges, leading law firm DLA Piper enhanced the

efficiency of search for information firm-wide;

reduced the number of silos that made it hard for

their staff to have a single view of content; and built

a search-based application that enhanced document

management and sharing.

Q&

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Smarter Search: How DLA Piper Drives Efficiency with Search Based Applications

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Introduction

Michael Tominna, Senior Manager of Web and Search Systems at global law firm DLA Piper recently presented

some of the Firm’s key content management challenges to an audience at the 2012 Information Legal Technology

Association conference. He revealed how DLA Piper made search for information across the Firm’s legal content

more efficient, and how they reduced the number of silos that made it hard for their staff to have a single view of

information.

This Q&A guide reflects the contents of that presentation, and highlights key challenges for the organization and

how they overcame them.

Bio: Michael Tominna

Michael helps guide the strategic direction and manage the ongoing operations of the

Web and Search team at DLA Piper, a global law firm with over 8,000 employees. His

team is actively engaged in developing the strategic knowledge management direction of

the law firm. He is also responsible for the Firm’s search systems, work product

retrieval applications, document assemblies and creation, management and user support

for online, legal matter, and collaborative work spaces.


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Project Overview

Q: What were some key challenges you faced regarding content management?

A: Michael Tominna: The challenges that we at DLA Piper faced were:

1. How do we get our users to content faster, better, and more efficient?

2. How do we get attorneys to all the right knowledge available in our firm, and to be able to reuse it

consistently?

3. We wanted to cut down the gap time between non-billable events.

4. On top of that, we wanted to enable a unified view for the information, so a search-based application

basically allowed us to create critical business applications using search.

5. We also wanted to reduce the number of silos we have across the firm using enterprise search.

Q: What was the final outcome?

A: Michael Tominna: For our project we integrated all of our data sources, including West km, Thomson Elite,

InterAction, and others. We're using BA Insight Connectors and their Longitude Preview technology to wrap all

of these components up and create a single platform to search across our enterprise.

Data Sources Integrated by DLA Piper


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Primary Goals

Q: What were your key goals and objectives for the project?

A: Michael Tominna: Prior to the project, we set goals around helping to improve our employees’ user

experience with SharePoint and to increase their productivity. Those goals included:

High Performance - Everybody wants fast search. Google kind of ruined it for everybody because, I

mean, you get search results instantly. You get type-ahead right away. So, our users, and most law

firms expect the same type of behavior when they are coming to do search internally.

Fault Tolerance / High Availability - Sometimes with platforms, right, you lose one of your index

servers and it takes your whole search platform down. We've actually got a full redundancy, so we can

lose two servers and not experience over-queried performance or a crawl performance. So, unless we

lose one of our entire data centers, our users are online with search the entire time.

Provide Intuitive User Experience - Intuitive user interface - we've spent a lot of time undoing.

We've spent a lot of time sitting down with attorneys and just having them run searches and analyzing if

they were able to find where to click, how to click, how long it took them to scroll around the page

with their cursor, try to really build a nice, unique UI on top of the SharePoint platform.

Enable Rapid Configuration of SBAs - We're looking at platform technology. We don't want a

black box. We want something we can code against. We want something that we can create that is

highly documented to really start investing in search throughout the enterprise. We also want it fully

integrated into our SharePoint part, so it is tied in at all levels. You can search all the resources

outside of the intranet through some other tools constantly.

Display Information Dynamically - Once we deploy Enterprise search and build this platform, we

can leverage that to build new applications on top of it. For example, we can build client matter pages

with mash-up data from different sources. You’re basically getting a dynamic matter dashboard.


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What They Accomplished

Q: What do people see when they search for content since you’ve completed the project?

A: Michael Tominna: The result of this project was our iManage search center – it displays information in a

format people are used to, similar to Google.

DLA Piper’s Managed Search Center

Q: How has the project impacted search results?

A: Michael Tominna: We now have a rich search experience. We're bringing in metadata, we're bringing in

snippets of information, and actually that shows details at citation levels. We're also bringing in content from

West km. So, right here, we're actually doing citation extraction from all of our litigation documents, making

it available to our attorneys right on the results page, and providing direct links back to Thompson West.

Attorneys can read the full citation reviews, so they actually never have to leave the results page to get at the

content they are looking for.


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Q: What capabilities have helped to provide richer search results?

A: Michael Tominna: Refiners; people are pretty used to using them. Again, they provide a common set of

functionality to drill down and reduce your set based on all the metadata we bring in. We are bringing in

metadata from West km, and searching through client names, matters, or pulling content in from our Elite

business intake for areas of law. We're also bringing in industry codes from our interaction environments.

We can actually drill down by industry type, and we're basically retagging all those documents in enterprise

search based on the client matter numbers and correlating it through. What we're really doing is creating a

data warehouse that's in a search index instead of a database.

DLA Piper’s search capability provides rich client search results across multiple data sets


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Q: How has the ability to pull data from multiple systems impacted search results?

A: Michael Tominna: This is where we really start talking about how we mash up data, and not having to

search via silos anymore. So when we search for a client number; right now we're bringing in every single

matter that's listed out of Elite and we're bringing in all of our contacts from our interaction environment via a

single solution.

Now the power you get from the platform, is that here I can actually tie in any third party SharePoint web

part. So, if I've got web analytics I can bring it in from a client perspective and I can tie it up in a single page. If

I've got docket information and reports, the nice thing with the SharePoint platform is that I can segment the

ability to view information by audience. So, if I only want partners to see financial web parts, I specify a

partner audience. If an associate does the same client search, they are going to see about three less web parts

than the partner gets. This is where we start integrating search in as a real line of business application.

A lot of people out there are creating matter pages or creating very custom sites to produce a lot of this stuff.

Snapshot of DLA Piper’s client matter pages

Q: What is your approach for matter pages?

A: Michael Tominna: With matter pages we use the same concept. So, right now we're bringing in

documents from iManage. Eventually from a mash up perspective, we're going to bring in the iManage web

part so it becomes fully interactive. To launch documents you're going to actually run through their preview.

You can also re-categorize and re-profile documents. We're also going to be bringing in our dockets if it's a

litigation matter. Basically, any web part that you can somehow associate back to a client matter number

essentially supports a client matter portal out of the box just by using BA Insight SharePoint Connector.


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DLA Piper’s portal can reference content by expertise based on search terms

Q: What is another area where you have been able to help users key in on specific information and

provide a more focused search experience?

A: Michael Tominna: Expertise. We can actually topically search for who our experts are in the firm, and

right here we're bringing back at least the minimum of the top ten documents for each individual expert. For

example, if you did a search for nanotechnology patent infringement it looks through documents attorneys

have published, their time notes, billing, and attorney biographies to determine expertise. Now where this

ties into a broader platform, is that it also connects to our social media tools for internal communication and

ties in with status messages.

So, for example, if I click on that person's name it's automatically going to take me to my SharePoint My Site

for that individual and bring up their profile where I can view what they've tagged and their recent activities.

On top of that, with presence awareness, there will be a little icon next to the person's name that says if they

are available or offline. From there I can actually click on their name, call them, send them an e-mail, shoot

them an IM, or spin up a WebEx. So again, building that as something that sits across the overall environment

versus a discrete application provides significant value.


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DLA Piper also added document preview capabilities, in-document hit highlighting, and quick

sharing features

Q: Downloading and viewing documents that come up in a search can be time consuming. Users

have to open them, search them manually, and then open up their e-mail application to share

relevant content. How has DLA Piper streamlined this process?

A: Michael Tominna: We have a preview capability that launches when a user wants to view a document.

So instead of having the attorney open up every single document to figure out if it contains the content they

are looking for, each document icon that displays as the result of a search is clickable and brings up a preview.

Hit highlighting in the document will also show how many color-coded hits there are on all the pages for that

topic. Users can then jump around to the most relevant content.

We’ve also added capability within the preview window to download the document, e-mail it, print it, and rate

it. The other thing that's really cool is I actually have search within preview. So, if I want to start an additional

query in that particular preview document, I type it in and it's going to give me a new color code for those

results. I don't have to re-execute the search.

The other item related to documents that we are working on with BA Insight and West km is to actually

integrate citation flags directly in the preview. So, on the fly, without the user having to open up the

document and see if the case law is still relevant for every citation in the preview, you'll either see a red,

yellow, or green flag that's updated on the fly. This streamlines the process - no more spending time opening

it in Word, running your West km, and then closing it out.


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Next Steps

Q: What’s next for your search platform?

A: Michael Tominna: I’ve already mentioned a few things. We want to ensure that we have the following

capabilities in place:

Fully integrated search platform. This means tie-ins with presence awareness, and utilizing web parts on

our search pages. Not only are we going to bring web parts into the search results, but we can also actually

schedule web parts on certain pages to bring content onto our internet. So, I can actually set up their tags

through metadata. Let's say I have exemplar documents. I can put a web part up on the real estate page that

says anything tagged with metadata that contains the term ‘real estate’ and anything tagged as ‘exemplar’. I can

then execute a query and it's going to bring me back the document results.

West km integration version 2: This involves managing statements, right? So right now I think we've got

about 900,000 documents in our environment, which we're actually going to get metadata on. At that point,

we'll have full document types for litigation. We'll be able to extract judge, jurisdiction, entity, and courts.

Really we're talking about that full population now, which is something that's really messy. So that capability

will hopefully help our attorneys find content a little bit quicker than they can now.

Custom user base relevancy: Sometimes you put in a query and you're getting documents back for

transaction, for litigation, or for real estate, depending on what your query is. We can actually go in and say, if

you're a litigator, I'm going to tune your default relevancy to litigation-based documents. So, just because

you're part of that litigation group, anything that's tagged is being authored out of the litigation group. We're

going to boost relevancy on the fly to make all that stuff come up at the top of the search list.

If you're working across-practice groups, you can potentially use the drop down to select which practice

group you want to aim the relevancy towards. We're actually building into business logic here to help people

find that content as they need it. The last thing we're going to be looking at to utilize search for is potentially

our stateless VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) environment. So, if you're using a non-persistent disk,

there's actually an issue where there's no local search because and the index gets blown away when you turn

off your computer every night. What we're going to do is actually call our file shares and then through a tool

on the desktop we'll let you call your file share. We will mask it as Windows, but it is really going to be going

to the enterprise engine and not your desktop.

Search-based applications: Has anybody ever heard the term search-based application? It's not a topic

people typically know about, but this is really where we start talking about utilizing search to create line of

business systems. It's not just pointing and crawling, it's actually targeting this stuff.

Client matter comparison: We are going to implement client matter comparison through a component

BA Insight is releasing called Parametric searching. We're going to basically tag all of our clients and matters

with different aspects and metadata, and then you'll see on the fly result changes as you're making your

selection. For example, if I want a mass tort litigation case that's gone on for seven years, as I'm selecting each

one of those fields the options I can select below are going to update automatically. My counts are going to

also update automatically. Let's say I'm pitching out a new deal, and I've got to figure out “Okay, what have I

done that was like this matter previously?” I can go through and I can see how many attorneys that I have to

staff, how many paralegals that I use on that matter, how much did we bill out per year, and at what stage. I

can actually use some modeling components to say, “You know I might be able to do this litigation for you for

$3 million year fixed.” So we can actually start using it as a business deal.


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Client matter portal: We talked about this a little bit, it acts like a data warehouse. We can start bringing

in third party web parts to integrate it all as part of the single solution.

Conflict searches: The last thing we're going to look at, which we just started on, is conflict searching. So,

could we actually run all of our conflict searches through enterprise search with the data we're bringing in?

The Fulcrum engine is a little older these days, so we want to see if we can actually replicate this functionality,

potentially use some of the services to auto-run queries for us, get that first result set and see if it's a little bit

faster, more intuitive platform for running those reports.


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BA Insight is a leader in agile information integration, enabling businesses to drive innovation by leveraging

all knowledge and data across the enterprise. They offer new-generation, cost-effective alternatives to

expensive systems integration projects and offer award-winning technology that provides a scalable

foundation for liberating enterprise data, both structured and unstructured. As Microsoft’s go-to partner

for advanced Search technologies, BA Insight enables customers to leverage their investments in

SharePoint, FAST and other enterprise systems and extend them with an overlay of easy-to-assemble,

highly targeted business applications. Since 2004, more than three million users around the world have

relied on BA Insight for low-cost, on-demand access to the information they need.

To learn more about BA Insight, visit www.BAinsight.com.

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