The Battle to Tame Unstructured Data - ' The Search for Meaning '
(
Page 2 of 5 )
The Search for Meaning
It is not uncommon for the attorneys at Sheppard Mullin to generate up to 2,000 e-mails during a merger or acquisition deal. In years past, these messages, many of which covered important aspects of the transaction, were simply archived with tens of thousands of other e-mails. More than a few were deleted outright. When the time came to find a particular message, attorneys wasted enormous amounts of time searching for it. Quite often, they never found it. "It was a problem, and the partners said we needed to address it," Baldwin says.
Many attempts have been made to put a dollar figure on the productivity loss associated with looking for old e-mails or tracking down important company memos. For instance, the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm in Fremont, Calif., estimates that a company with 10,000 employees can save nearly $2.5 million by just improving search on its intranet. But these estimates vary widely and often are so arbitrary that "they just become noise people ignore," says Stouffer Egan, chief strategy officer in the U.S. for Autonomy Corp. plc, a Cambridge, U.K. based software company that specializes in managing unstructured data. That said, lost productivity is a "big problem, and all organizations are aware of it," he adds.
CIO Paulson and Baldwin looked at what they saw as the easiest, most cost-effective solution to their problem: desktop search. They looked at numerous free applications, but, says Baldwin, these technologies didn't offer simple features such as a preview of documents or highlighting of search terms.
Instead, they chose Pasadena, Calif.-based X1 Technologies Inc.'s enterprise desktop search. The product quickly indexes data—in this case e-mails—on a computer and then displays a portion of the e-mail. With a click of the mouse, the user can call up the entire message. In 2005, the firm deployed the desktop application to 900 users. Baldwin says that the financial outlay, about $90,000, has paid for itself in increased satisfaction and productivity. Now, when a question arises during an M&A transaction, attorneys can do a quick search and see all the e-mails related to that specific deal. "Our lawyers have become addicted to it," Baldwin says.
While effective, Sheppard Mullin's new desktop search does not let the attorneys search the firm's real trove of information. Each time an attorney creates a brief or plea in Microsoft Word, it is automatically deposited in the firm's content-management system, which, to date, has one million such documents. As with Microsoft Outlook, the standard search features that came with the firm's content-management system "weren't effective," says Baldwin.
Worse, the problem compounded itself. Attorneys working on a brief would often send out all-company e-mails asking if someone else at the firm had written a similar brief they could draw upon, thus creating yet more unstructured data. The e-mails, not surprisingly, were routinely ignored. In a pilot project, slated to be completed this spring, Baldwin and his colleagues will finish integrating another X1 product with Sheppard Mullin's content-management system that they expect will provide accurate indexing and searching capabilities. When completed, Sheppard Mullin attorneys hope that they will no longer have to "reinvent the wheel when they write a brief," says Baldwin. "We will be able to reuse some of our own intellectual property."
Story Guide:
The Battle to Tame Unstructured Data
The Search For Meaning
Search Engines for Search Engines
The Ethics of Data
The Enterprise Approach?
Sidebar: The Data Revolution Will Be Televised
Next page: Search Engines for Search Engines
test
