Industry Vertical: Legal

Corporations have large volumes of unstructured and unmanaged information across the enterprise as well as constrained budget and inside expertise to process legal requests. Law firms are constantly dealing with large volumes of client data and need to manage both the data and individual matters across multiple practice areas, while ensuring the ability to track and maintain the extended data associated with litigation and investigation. Autonomy can help:

Corporate legal departments and law firms face significant obstacles to achieving a fast and effective eDiscovery process. Corporations often depend on multiple, disconnected point solutions from different technology providers. Each step in the process requires a costly and time-consuming hand-off of information. Because these tools lack the ability to form a conceptual understanding of the data, they are unable to automate the process of quickly identifying and holding only relevant information for each case. As a result, in a process where speed and accuracy are of paramount importance to success, law firms are often left with their hands tied while they wait for access to their corporate clients' data.

Law Firms and Corporate Legal Departments run on tight budgets and constantly strive to keep their IT expenses low while they must secure all of their content and have immediate access to information at all times. Corporate Legal must meet and exceed compliance requirements while rapidly responding to litigation pressures and regulatory inquiries. As the types and volume of content expand the enforcement of lifecycle policies on email, IMs, desktop files, databases, social media, website content and audio or video assets becomes complicated and expensive.

Screening for conflicts of interest is a critical process for law firms while on-boarding new clients, protecting the interests of existing clients while also complying with professional and ethical responsibility rules. The process has become an increasingly complex task for law firms given the rise of mergers and acquisitions, globalization and the increase in lateral hires within the legal industry. Autonomy ConflictsManager - an innovative solution that enables law firms to streamline the management of their conflicts of interest process, ConflictsManager detects patterns and reduces the risk and time for new client vetting procedures. The solution also offers the following advanced capabilities:

Law Firms compete aggressively for legal talent and high-end corporate customers. Their brand, including their web presence, must be current and show well to both legal experts and those seeking legal assistance.

Summary Points:

The ability to access the right information easily and quickly is fundamental to improving efficiency for a law firm. Law firms must deliver services in a cost-effective manner. With the shift towards alternative billing models, firms must focus on the productivity of fee earners. A sound Knowledge Management ("KM") strategy will position a firm to pursue and win work based on these changes and protect the firm's margins.

Litigation Service Providers need to offer a wide range of solutions in the most flexible way to best meet the varied needs of their clients. Autonomy eDiscovery solutions can be licensed in a modular fashion by service provider to enhance their service offerings. Leading Litigation Service Providers use Autonomy for the following reasons:

Throughout the past ten years, the firm's Commercial Disputes Group (CDG) has worked on numerous large, high-profile international cases in conjunction with other law firms in the US and beyond. While the firm played a key role in the disputes, lawyers at the firm found that they had to learn multiple litigation support and eDiscovery systems provided by different partner firms or clients. The partners at Richards Butler identified the need for a system which could scale to very large cases, deploy quickly, access from remote client sites, and prove had been successful at other large firms. Autonomy Introspect was deployed throughout Richards Butler's global offices within four weeks of purchase with 40 staff trained on the system. Richards Butler anticipates 100% increase in pages and has used Introspect for a major $140 million global case. "Introspect's ability to scale gives us confidence that we can add the new case without glitches in any of the cases running on the system," said Hanley. "The exciting development is that we are now managing the litigation support and eDiscovery for all of these major cases."

DLA Piper wanted to enable their lawyers to easily find the right work product along with related unstructured content, identify experts to better leverage the firm's skills, seed retrieval of marketing and sales collateral and an out-of-the-box user experience designed specifically for lawyers. "After evaluating the different vendors, Autonomy Universal Search was the obvious choice as it met all the above requirements. Its seamless integration with WorkSite would build the bridge between the KM solution and a lawyer's day to day workflow and improve the usage of the KM solution." Said Daniel Pollock, CIO of DLA Piper UK. With Universal Search deployed, lawyers across the globe are able to easily and quickly find the right information as well as tap into the firm's global expertise pool for better business efficiencies. Investing in a solution that share a common platform with Autonomy WorkSite has helped lower the total cost of ownership and set the foundation for future initiatives.

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To help its lawyers better manage matter content, including paper, email messages and electronic documents, and improve client service, SJ Berwin needed a major upgrade of its document management capabilities. SJ Berwin professionals across Europe can now access and share repositories of matter-centric information containing more than twelve million electronic documents, scanned images and emails with Autonomy WorkSite. "Most importantly," says Kosminsky, "it allows us to provide significantly better and more flexible service to clients – any lawyer receiving an urgent call at 2 a.m. can deal with problems instantly, without the need to return to the office or carry cumbersome folders home with them." The reduction of paper storage has had a dramatic bottom-line impact. The firm calculated that it could reduce storage requirements by half and cut its annual storage costs from $2.5 million to only $1.25 million. Now, SJ Berwin can be sure that people who need access to particular information – and only those people – can have it, regardless of where they happen to be working. At the same time, the firm has been able to make guarantees about retention and storage policies that have affected everything from the relationship with clients to the size of insurance and indemnity premiums.

Subsidiary of the world's third largest defense contractor, BAE Systems chose Autonomy Email Archiving to improve its ability to comply with eDiscovery requests, eliminate the usage of PST files across the enterprise, and to enhance the end-user experience.

BAE purchased IDOL, Enterprise Archive Server, Meridio EDRM, Aungate Realtime Policy Management, Aungate Legal Hold and Aungate Investigator with a large array of functionalities including Mailbox Archiving, PST Archiving, Legal Hold and Investigator. Autonomy will be indexing information from BAE Systems Microsoft Exchange Environment for an unlimited number of users within the United States.

Frost Brown Todd needed to reduce its growing document storage costs, as well as to apply an enterprise-wide retention policy. From a risk management perspective, the firm also needed a better way to identify and locate documents in its possession – as a client lawsuit made dramatically clear. "One of our clients was being sued, and we had to hold everything in the entire firm related to them," says Paul Bromwell, the firm's CIO. Even though the firm was using Autonomy WorkSite for document management, records outside the system couldn't easily be locked down. Deploying Autonomy Records Manager enabled management of both physical and electronic records, while applying a consistent records policy that reduced offsite storage costs and mitigated the risk of retaining information indefinitely. Bromwell says, "I believe the combination of WorkSite and Records manager will finally give us the information management capabilities we need to treat all documents –physical, electronic, and e-mail—the same way and with a uniform retention policy."