Knowledge Empowers Law Firm

Application

  • Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP Portal

Description

  • Knowledge Management Portal

Advantages

  • Extended search capabilities
  • Flexible infrastructure
  • Unified access to employee directory and research tools

CLIENT BACKGROUND

Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, one of the top 10 law firms in the United States and chosen by The American Lawyer for its 2005 A-List of top 20 law firms, is a leader in the marketplace for sophisticated, international legal services with practice areas in Business Finance & Restructuring, Corporate, Tax, and Litigation/Regulatory. With more than 1,200 lawyers across the United States, Europe and Asia, the firm serves many of the most successful companies in the world in their high-stakes matters and transactions.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Weil Gotshal needed to streamline access to its knowledge repositories, allowing for sharing within and across the firm’s 20 offices. With information stored electronically in a variety of applications, searching for relevant information was both time-consuming and difficult for attorneys and support staff.

SOLUTION

When Weil Gotshal, an IBM customer, was looking for portal software offering rich integration features in order to build a single personalized view into the firm, it chose IBM WebSphere Portal for its open standards and flexible infrastructure. WebSphere Portal allowed Weil Gotshal to customize a unified, portal interface to its existing applications, in this case the ability to search multiple data repositories (Hummingbird's DOCSOpen document management system, Lotus Notes databases) via the MatchPoint enterprise search engine. WebSphere Portal also enabled the firm to build a robust employee directory and knowledge tool portlets.

After selecting WebSphere Portal on the Linux platform, the firm looked for an IBM Business Partner to complement its development team. Prolifics provided the necessary J2EE, Java and WebSphere Portal expertise to successfully complete the first phase of this portal project which took about 6 months including design, infrastructure, security, development, QA and deployment.

While the long-term objective is to develop a new intranet using WebSphere Portal, the first phase had three major objectives. The most important was to allow searches across all its knowledge repositories—containing DOCS Open libraries and Lotus Notes and Domino databases—which had been indexed using the MatchPoint enterprise search engine. Before this project, searches were performed on each document source individually. Now with the ability to perform faster, consolidated searches across document repositories, the project has been enthusiastically received by attorneys.
With over 3,000 employees worldwide, another project goal was to have a portal-based interface to the employee directory with expanded search criteria and a method to store employee contact information as quick links.

This project also allowed attorneys to become more self-sufficient by providing a unified interface linking to internal and external legal research tools and staff, including an automated request system. The next phase of the portal project will focus on retrieving related matter information into a single interface. The additions will arm attorneys with the client and matter business intelligence they need to do their jobs more efficiently, and will further increase Weil Gotshal’s quality of client service and competitive edge.

“Prolifics was recommended to us as an IBM Business Partner with highly-specialized J2EE and WebSphere Portal expertise. They helped us design and deploy a robust portal solution that provides our employees with consolidated and secure access to company resources and services.”
— Nathaniel Kanner, Supervisor of Application Development