As I promised, here is a summary of the replies I received regarding law firm brief banks.
There were a good number of responses, and very helpful, I think.
Many thanks to all who replied with such good information.
FRANK DRAKE
Arnstein & Lehr LLP
CHICAGO
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We use PowerDocs which I assume is similar to Imanage. We had IS create
an extra field in the document profile called "DRIM category" (DRIM =
document retrieval something.. Named before I got here 20 years ago. It
was the paper predecessor like yours - inefficient and now defunct)
The policy is - any document worthy of future reference because of
either content or form should be "drimmed" Drimming in PowerDocs means
1. selecting a DRIM category (which are very general)
2. adding keywords or brief abstract in the description field
3. Resetting security on the document to allow 'read only' access to
everyone except author and secretary who have full access.
4. Editing the document title to reflect its content or form (optional)
The idea is that if documents of future value are selected out by adding
a DRIM category, a search using a category should retrieve only good
stuff. The reality is that after 5 years the attorneys are just wising
up to the how and why. When we first introduced this most attorneys
were not capable of making the changes to the profile. Now they are
beginning to catch up, but of course many years of valuable documents
are buried in with the garbage. I DRIM documents whenever I go
searching and find something good. I would love to know how to motivate
the attorneys to input the documents. We have the process down to a 30
second edit and we still have the same low level of participation we had
with the paper files.
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I have the same problem. We discussed forcing the attorneys to use
keywords in the comment field; but nothing came of that.
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We are testing WestKM which has allows us to pull different collections from
iManage including all litigation documents with legal citations. It is a
good product you might want to look at. The Lexis TotalSearch product is
not near as sophisticated yet.
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We are using Docs Open for a Brief bank we are just about to roll out. We've created
a Library in it, which we call, originally enough "Brief Bank". Our litigators
looked at names for the various document types to assign and settled on 4 choices
- Brief, Discovery, Research and Other, which they have further defined. We are
working on guidelines for inclusion, we expect most of the work will get done by
the assistants, but the attorney will have to do the "nomination" for
inclusion into the database, and the criteria will be strict - only the filed version,
for instance, no summer clerk work, etc. All will be templates only.
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We do text in file searches through Worldox, with the document type "brief".
But these are only OUR briefs. I'm having trouble getting through to others
that a true brief bank should contain both parties...Do you keep briefs from
opposing parties?
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Regardless of which database you use, you will need to create "fields"
to make it meaningful to your users. "Full text" will not yield
meaningful documents unless they are organized. Otherwise, you might as
well use the "search" command in Windows. It will be just as good and
will not cost you any additional money. Does your firm have a
documents management system? In theory, that can work too, but again
will not do the job as good as a well-designed document.
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We used Imanage at V&E and PCDocs. Because both systems
create libraries of documents, usually based on location of the documents
server you can't really search across servers. Additionally, the necessary
data elements are not keyed or selected at the time the document is created
thereby eliminating some of the most useful winnowing tools (like doc type
of brief, memo, etc.) The only solution I could see would be to create a
new library called something snappy (like research library?) and the various
existing libraries of documents would be culled and coded and copied over to
the new research library.
Yep, very labor intensive. The other solution would be to use either of the
Lexis or Westlaw solutions but, guess what, that is the process they follow
as well as they don't really have a solution for the multiple document
server problem (unless that has changed in the last few months I've been in
academia). That problem is that each server sequentially numbers the
documents so you will have multiple occurrences of the same number for
multiple documents (as many as you have servers so, 12 servers, 12 documents
numbered 1201, for instance) which sort of defeats the "unique identifier"
needed to retrieve the document. Dropping them over to a special "research"
server library doesn't solve that problem (indeed, it adds yet another
document with the same number) but people will only be searching in that
research library.
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I made a databank of 50 years of memos and briefs, beautifully
retrievable, but cost an arm and a leg. Unless you are willing to spend
a lot of money to developing another system, InMagic is the most
economical way of handling it. I have worked with a number of
customized databases, and they need yearly upkeep, are expensive to
develop ($20K+), etc.
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We implemented West KM last year and we had to use our DMS (Imanage) to vet
the documents into West KM. Our search analysis of Imanage was pretty
scary. Bottom line, the full text searching in Imanage is very bad and very
inconsistent. For example, we would run the same search 4-5 times and get
different results each time! In fact, it was so bad, it was the main reason
the attorneys wanted West KM so much.
We've had print and computerized brief banks in the past and I think the
West KM product is light years ahead of those.
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I have seen WL KM program demonstrated and it is really powerful, but
the cost was prohibitive for us.
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Setting up a separate database in Imanage is what I had been thinking. I first
have to check with our IT staff as to the expense of setting up the subset.
Another idea is to use WESTLAW's KM tool, but I have no idea how expensive that
will be. Still, it should be very usable by the attorneys, so we will investigate
it.
As for selecting the docs for the subset, I don't mind putting a modest number of
irrelevant docs in the subfile, as long as the selection prcess pulls the majority
of relevant docs. Since in Imanage we have categorized most of the documents (birefs,
memos, litmemos, etc.), those categories COULD be a quick and dirty way of making
up the subset.
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I am in the EXACT same position right now. We have IManage... too much irrelevant
information. We have talked about creating a separate database for the re-usable
briefs. The big problem seems to be working out a process for nominating briefs
to go in the bank and indexing them. The attorneys want to have a hand in it but
no one has any time.
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We use PC DOCS as our doc management system. We have document types we
can assign for the brief bank and the memobank . The attorneys assign
these profiles if they think the document merits inclusion in the brief
/ memo bank. I pull these out quarterly and put them on the firm
intranet and we use DT Search as the search & retrieval software.
Whats so nice about this software is the display and search syntax is
very similar to WEXIS you get a split screen with the search results
cite list on the left side and the document on the right with display
commands such as next & prev doc and next & previous hit
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