By Legal Futures’ Associate iManage
AI-powered application reduces search time from hours to seconds for more than 750,000 documents from the firm’s global offices in 20 countries.
iManage, the company dedicated to transforming how professionals work, today announced that Linklaters LLP, an elite London-headquartered global law firm, has launched MatterExplorer, an AI-powered search and knowledge management system, reducing search time for the firm’s 750,000 legal documents from hours to seconds. Since MatterExplorer launched, Linklaters has run more than 185,000 searches. If each of those searches saved just five minutes of time, more than 15,000 hours have been saved across the firm in the last 6 months.
The new system uses AI to identify which documents are most relevant to search criteria and classify documents by type, including legal opinions and share purchase agreements, making it more efficient for Linklaters’ lawyers to find precedent documents. Lawyers can now find information about past matters from a variety of perspectives, including sector, jurisdiction and area of law, access the full-text documents and explore their connections to data in multiple sources – matter details, financials, people data, client data and time recording. This capability has resulted in a 400 percent increase in search utilization compared to the system that MatterExplorer replaced.
“It’s all about getting our arms around the knowledge that we possess, which, next to our people, is the greatest asset that we have,” said Sophie Mathur, Partner and Co-head of the Innovation Steering Group, Linklaters. “Our aim is to access our expertise and deliver it to our clients with greater efficiency in an era when the world is demanding a much more empirical approach to data. The individual experience of one lawyer is no longer enough. MatterExplorer, using iManage RAVN Insight, allows us to be rigorous in the way in which we exploit what we know.”
“We are delighted to have launched MatterExplorer as part of innovation and data workstreams,” said Rachel Manser, Head of Knowledge & Learning, Linklaters. “MatterExplorer supports our strategy to invest in our clients and empower our teams by integrating knowhow and marketing information with financial information, so our lawyers can find, store, explore and report on high-quality data, all at the click of a button. We are excited to further leverage iManage RAVN’s AI capability to mine and extract data from our documents.”
Going forward, Linklaters is continuing to work with iManage to further expand its use of iManage RAVN within MatterExplorer, focusing on automatically reading and extracting business critical information from documents and unstructured data to create content for marketing and business development, further enhancing new client engagements.
“Linklaters’ use of iManage RAVN is a textbook example of how firms can harness the power of AI to solve specific business problems,” said Nick Thomson, General Manager, iManage RAVN. “The firm has astutely recognised that embedding an AI engine at the foundation level and exploiting its power incrementally and across practice areas will not only deliver success in knowledge management but also enable the firm to logically and intuitively extend its use into other areas, thus optimising ROI over the foreseeable future.”
