Lexis Search Advantage and Interwoven Universal Search

At the ILTA conference, Lexis and Interwoven announced that they have teamed together to provide some integration. (This is the big announcement I mentioned earlier:  Interwoven - Big Announcement at ILTA.)

Lexis Search Advantage is a new product from Lexis Nexis. It links to case law, statutes and regulations, with real time Shepard's indicators for cited cases.  It also works with transaction documents by creating a virtual table of contents, a search for reusable clauses and links to companies and people.

The key to Lexis Search Advantage is that in integrates into Interwoven Universal Search.  Lexis is adding value to firm's existing content and not creating a separate silo of information.  This collapses searches of internal content, Lexis content and updating cases into one platform and one step.  Internal content is combined with Lexis sources.

According to Doug Stansfield of Lexis, they partnered with Interwoven Universal Search because they thought it was the best enterprise search product in the marketplace for law firms. 

In the search results, there is a "research preview" button. This brings up a HTML preview of the document with live links to the cases cited in the document and Shepard's signals to the treatment of those cases. Clicking the Lexis content triggers the Lexis charges. The charges are based on your firm's subscription model. You also have highlighting that shows the search terms in the document. The Shepard's signals are updated when the document is opened and rendered. Not when the document is indexed.

Lexis also allows a search of web content to be another place that you search with Universal Search.  I noticed the search they used also included content on JD Supra and some blogs. (Yet another reason lawyers should be blogging and posting documents to JD Supra.

For transactional documents, the document has a link to information on people and companies. If the document has IBM as a party, you have a live link to the Lexis Dossier on IBM.  You can also pull up the SEC filings for public companies. The links are configurable, so you could link to Interaction information or other internal sources of information instead.

Search Advantage also offers some auto-profiling of documents.  It can be matched to a firm's taxonomy or a Lexis taxonomy.

There are three big advantages to the mashup:

• Improves ‘Findability’ of content in Interwoven repositories by enriching documents with external meta-data at index time. During indexing, Search Advantage scans the contents of all documents and e-mail.  When it finds a citation to legal authority (court case, statute, etc.), it can add the court or the judge to the searchable metadata of the document. This allows you to find, for example, all documents that cite a particular case or that were filed in a particular court.
• It eliminates several manual steps previously required to assess current legal validity of precedents and previous firm documents via ‘real-time’ Shepard’s signals. When a user previews a document the document will be shepardized in real time.
• Makes it easier to navigate from a internal document to case-law on lexis.com. Citations to previous cases, statutes, etc. are automatically hyperlinked to the corresponding source document on lexis.com when previewed from Interwoven Universal Search.

Universal Search is already an impressive product. This integration makes it that much more powerful.

There is public demo of the product on Wednesday in Texas Ballroom 5.

Press Release: Interwoven and LexisNexis Team Up to Introduce Integrated Solution