Total Search: The Answer to Law Firm Productivity!

In this age of increased client demand for greater efficiency when it comes to legal services, coupled with the ever-facing challenge of firms dealing with competitive market pressures and ever-declining revenues, the legal professional faces the dilemma to give the client a higher return on his legal investment dollar!

But how can technology help to solve this ever-increasing problem? One way in finding a solution is about to come forth from a well-established 30-year-old firm – LexisNexis. The company has put forth an all-encompassing solution that should allow the legal market a chance to be an even brighter and shinier star to its clientele. The program is designed to provide added value to the legal researcher and share their firm-wide knowledge within and across hitherto disconnected boundaries!

The problem has always been that a firm within itself has several knowledge bases and proprietary documents and drafted pleadings upon which it depends. At the same time, while it worked within its own knowledge base, it then went from within to the vast amounts of information residing within LexisNexis at Lexis.com! If only a firm could do both at the same time, with total integration ' that seemed to be the annoying problem.

Well now that time has come, with the advent of LexisNexis Total Search. What has been achieved is no less than integrating research at Lexis.com with searches against the law firm's own internal work product, using a highly scalable and state-of-the-art search engine. The unique part of the product is the application of an intelligent referencing engine that automatically identifies a firm's own work product that may including cited cases or statutes, or even, in some situations, a particular point of law.

All of this resides, in the physical sense, upon the law firm's premises and behind its own firewall, and at the core of the Lexis Total Search application is the IDR (Internal Document Repository) Server. What the server does is perform the search and retrieval at the same level as the LexisNexis premier search engines. With the IDR performing the intelligent referencing of a firms internal document in parallel with the IDR server and the Lexis.com Web interface, the entire process is seamlessly blended together! This blending then becomes the best of both worlds ' between internal and external content.

The Total Search concept works essentially in the same manner as the familiar Lexis.com Web site. But the big difference is that a user can search his or her firm's internal work product at the same time as making a Lexis search. The navigation is essentially the same as working on the Web site, with a firm's own tab included within the site. You may be asking yourself: “How can this improve my firm's productivity?” It really is quite simple to understand. You can reduce the volumes of unproductive e-mail exchanges, intranet postings or the ever popular “has anyone ever done this” type of query, which seeks out the more experienced members of the firm, thereby resulting in a time savings and more efficient use of the firm's own resources.

Likewise, you can now share the best practices and drafting styles of the firm's shining stars among the work groups and practice areas of your firm, thereby fostering the mentoring process and training of the more junior attorneys and increasing their value to the firm in a quicker, more efficient manner. Last, but certainly not least, with Total Search, your large document management system (DMS) investment will be maximized through the capture and reuse of attorney work product that would otherwise become lost and buried in your large document management system's repository.

The Total Search concept is designed to simultaneously and securely search the LexisNexis databases and the firm's internal work product, which was created with the DMS within a single search – using the popular Lexis.com environment and the same search syntax. When the user searches Lexis for a single point of law, or legal issue, instantaneously the firm's database is also searched. As the search is run, in the chosen LexisNexis database, it is also run against the firm's internal database repository seamlessly, without the user ever having to consciously initiate another search. Now that saves time and effort, while doing a full and complete job!

There is also the user option to find materials residing only on the firm's database. In searching for firm documents the user merely selects the firm's identifier on the Web site. This allows internal work to be searched prior to incurring any search fees by Lexis. Likewise, embedded within the results are Shepard's Citations, something you can only acquire from Lexis.

I can personally inform you, from the internal view of the product that I recently received, that I see it will become a useful and popular item among most law firms, allowing greater productivity and creating a quality search capability that heretofore has only been imagined in the minds of attorneys! I have no doubt that once your firm has used LexisNexis Total Search, you will wonder why such a useful tool had not been thought of until this very moment. I highly recommend that you take a good look at LexisNexis Total Search, and then start your firm's next writing project with confidence that you will have all the data you really need to be competitive in today's legal marketplace ' internally and externally, as well!

In this age of increased client demand for greater efficiency when it comes to legal services, coupled with the ever-facing challenge of firms dealing with competitive market pressures and ever-declining revenues, the legal professional faces the dilemma to give the client a higher return on his legal investment dollar!

But how can technology help to solve this ever-increasing problem? One way in finding a solution is about to come forth from a well-established 30-year-old firm – LexisNexis. The company has put forth an all-encompassing solution that should allow the legal market a chance to be an even brighter and shinier star to its clientele. The program is designed to provide added value to the legal researcher and share their firm-wide knowledge within and across hitherto disconnected boundaries!

The problem has always been that a firm within itself has several knowledge bases and proprietary documents and drafted pleadings upon which it depends. At the same time, while it worked within its own knowledge base, it then went from within to the vast amounts of information residing within LexisNexis at Lexis.com! If only a firm could do both at the same time, with total integration ' that seemed to be the annoying problem.

Well now that time has come, with the advent of LexisNexis Total Search. What has been achieved is no less than integrating research at Lexis.com with searches against the law firm's own internal work product, using a highly scalable and state-of-the-art search engine. The unique part of the product is the application of an intelligent referencing engine that automatically identifies a firm's own work product that may including cited cases or statutes, or even, in some situations, a particular point of law.

All of this resides, in the physical sense, upon the law firm's premises and behind its own firewall, and at the core of the Lexis Total Search application is the IDR (Internal Document Repository) Server. What the server does is perform the search and retrieval at the same level as the LexisNexis premier search engines. With the IDR performing the intelligent referencing of a firms internal document in parallel with the IDR server and the Lexis.com Web interface, the entire process is seamlessly blended together! This blending then becomes the best of both worlds ' between internal and external content.

The Total Search concept works essentially in the same manner as the familiar Lexis.com Web site. But the big difference is that a user can search his or her firm's internal work product at the same time as making a Lexis search. The navigation is essentially the same as working on the Web site, with a firm's own tab included within the site. You may be asking yourself: “How can this improve my firm's productivity?” It really is quite simple to understand. You can reduce the volumes of unproductive e-mail exchanges, intranet postings or the ever popular “has anyone ever done this” type of query, which seeks out the more experienced members of the firm, thereby resulting in a time savings and more efficient use of the firm's own resources.

Likewise, you can now share the best practices and drafting styles of the firm's shining stars among the work groups and practice areas of your firm, thereby fostering the mentoring process and training of the more junior attorneys and increasing their value to the firm in a quicker, more efficient manner. Last, but certainly not least, with Total Search, your large document management system (DMS) investment will be maximized through the capture and reuse of attorney work product that would otherwise become lost and buried in your large document management system's repository.

The Total Search concept is designed to simultaneously and securely search the LexisNexis databases and the firm's internal work product, which was created with the DMS within a single search – using the popular Lexis.com environment and the same search syntax. When the user searches Lexis for a single point of law, or legal issue, instantaneously the firm's database is also searched. As the search is run, in the chosen LexisNexis database, it is also run against the firm's internal database repository seamlessly, without the user ever having to consciously initiate another search. Now that saves time and effort, while doing a full and complete job!

There is also the user option to find materials residing only on the firm's database. In searching for firm documents the user merely selects the firm's identifier on the Web site. This allows internal work to be searched prior to incurring any search fees by Lexis. Likewise, embedded within the results are Shepard's Citations, something you can only acquire from Lexis.

I can personally inform you, from the internal view of the product that I recently received, that I see it will become a useful and popular item among most law firms, allowing greater productivity and creating a quality search capability that heretofore has only been imagined in the minds of attorneys! I have no doubt that once your firm has used LexisNexis Total Search, you will wonder why such a useful tool had not been thought of until this very moment. I highly recommend that you take a good look at LexisNexis Total Search, and then start your firm's next writing project with confidence that you will have all the data you really need to be competitive in today's legal marketplace ' internally and externally, as well!