Reed Smith, with more than 3,200 lawyers, paralegals, consultants and support staff spread across 22 offices throughout Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, had all of the data challenges you’d expect from a firm of our size and sophistication, with the added challenge that we were aggressively expanding from both a practice focus and head-count perspective. Despite the fact that our total data creation had increased exponentially, we hadn’t invested nearly enough in our information infrastructure, and simple processes such as document retrieval were taking far too long. We knew we needed to take control of our data before it took hold of us. Following is an account of the firm’s recent implementation of Recommind’s MindServer Search platform as the foundation for its knowledge management infrastructure.
Due to a multitude of factors, including an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy and an expanding practice focus, Reed Smith has tripled in size over the last six years. This has put enormous pressure on our KM department to not only store corporate data, but also make it searchable and usable across the entire network. Exacerbating the firm’s rapid expansion, the reliance on legacy technology and manual processes started hurting productivity and efficiency, as attorneys and their teams found themselves spending increasing amounts of time searching for documents or experts within the company.
