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Search Your Firm's Documents Like Never Before
February 7, 2022
Today's TechnoLawyer Buyer's Guide report covers a knowledge management platform that searches your firm's documents with more granularity than the search function in your document management system, enabling you to find specific contractual language and deal terms.
Search Your Firm's Documents for Deal Points and Key Clauses Like Never Before
Drafting securities-related documents resembles music creation in that you often "remix" what you and colleagues created previously, adding tweaks based on your expertise, client preferences, and new developments in the law. This process of building on your firm's previous work product saves time and helps stay within budget.
Lexis Search Advantage | Transactional Powered by Intelligize in One Sentence
Lexis Search Advantage | Transactional Powered by Intelligize is a knowledge management platform that searches your firm's documents with more granularity than the search function in your document management system, enabling you to find specific contractual language and deal terms.
The Killer Feature
The search engine in your document management system requires you to enter the right keywords, which creates a chicken and egg problem as you may not know the precise phrase you need for a document you're drafting.
Intelligize revolutionized SEC EDGAR searching and now powers Search Advantage for your firm's own documents. Search Advantage categorizes the content within your documents using 319 document types. It also categorizes the clauses in documents.
This level of detail translates into the ability to find certain types of Deal Points for the document you're drafting — Go Shop, Hell or High Water, Sandbagging, and many others. Similarly, you can find documents by Document Type, Clause Type, Clause Title, and Defined Terms. Search Advantage highlights the relevant text in the search results so that you can quickly review it and add it to your document if it's a good fit.
"Our lawyers were impressed by the Search Advantage technology and how it applied the proven LexisNexis and Intelligize search logic against our internal work product," says Stephanie Godley, Senior Manager of Knowledge Management & Library Services at Ropes & Gray. "We concluded this was the solution we were seeking to better leverage the internal knowledge that resides within the vast store of documents in our document management system."
Lexis Search Advantage applies technology from Intelligize to your firm's documents. This enables lawyers at your firm to find relevant deal points, clauses, and more so they can draft documents more efficiently.
Other Notable Features
The pre-search filters discussed above might be all you need. To narrow your results, you can run Boolean and wild card searches and apply filters such as the companies involved, jurisdiction, governing law, and date range. Document management systems only know the creation and modification dates of documents. By contrast, Search Advantage extracts the execution date of agreements for more meaningful date-based filtering.
Your firm can customize the Search Advantage search panel, including with fields from your document management system such as Document ID, Client, and Matter. You can decide what to include in the Search Advantage corpus with vetting rules based on metadata. Also, Search Advantage honors your firm's security policies and ethics walls. If a lawyer lacks access to a document in your document management system, it will not surface in Search Advantage.
Search Advantage offers several tools for working with search results. You can switch among your last 10 searches using the tabbed interface. Each document has an accompanying navigation panel with hyperlinks to each section. Even more specific metadata links take you to deal points, definitions, reps and warranties, covenants, conditions, remedies, and other key clauses. Personal and public tags let you categorize key documents for easier future retrieval.
Export and sharing options include selecting phrases and exporting them into an Excel file, downloading multiple selected documents, and sharing your search results via email.
What Else Should You Know?
After searching your firm's documents, one click moves your search to Intelligize and returns results from EDGAR. Intelligize connects the dots even as the phraseology of key terms change so that you can understand the historical context and find What's Market now.
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TechnoLawyer, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office administrators. Many consider TechnoLawyer newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
