There’s gold in them thar hills. Mark Twain in 1892 novel The American Claimant
Almost every law firm has a great wealth of documents and knowledge locked up in work they have previously done in cases and matters. If only they could find it. The problem, as I have discussed before, is that lawyers don’t want to spend nonbillable time getting the information into a system where it could be searched and accessed. But a recent partnership between the major legal research player, vLex, and a leading document management vendor, iManage, is attempting to solve that problem.
The vLex-iManage Solution
Sandwiched between a lot of glitz and glamor at iManage’s recent ConnectLive customer Conference was an announcement by the two vendors of a partnership. The partnership is designed to enable customers of both to access those past efforts of the firm hidden away in its bowels. The idea is that customers can use vLex’s AI tool, Vincent, to respond to natural language queries based not only on case law from the vLex database but also on internal documents of a firm housed in iManage databases. Vincent is a powerful and impressive legal research tool that vLex says works without requiring users to devise a complicated prompt. The prompts, according to vLex, are built into the system.
It’s a pretty clever way to enable law firms and legal organizations to finally get at those past efforts without a lot of time and trouble. And since the iManage materials are in private and protected databases, privacy and confidentiality are assured, says iManage. But like any good tool, the results depend on how well the tool is used.
I had a chance to talk with Ed Walters, co-founder of FastCase, which merged with VLex some time ago. Walters is now Chief Strategy Officer