Recommind's MindServer Search Enhances Knowledge Management And Collaboration For Mills & Reeve

Implementation of legal industry’s leading solution successfully rolled out to the firm’s offices on-time and on-budget

LONDON, 14 October, 2009 – Recommind, the leader in search-powered information risk management (IRM) software, today announced that Mills & Reeve LLP, one of the UK’s leading full-service law firms, has completed the roll out of its MindServer® Search system to boost the firm’s knowledge management capabilities and enable greater collaboration amongst firm employees.

MindServer Search now arms the firm’s 800 employees across its six UK offices with the ability to quickly access information from both internal and external information sources. In addition, with MindServer Search’s Matters & Expertise™ module, Mills & Reeve is helping its staff easily locate colleagues with the most relevant answers to and knowledge of any query by sourcing experts – from language connoisseurs to topic specialists – and displaying them within the search results, offering relevant access to the firm’s entire staff.

“This was a super project to have been involved with and the first of its kind of such complexity that I’ve seen to be on-time and on-budget,” said Duncan Ogilvy, knowledge management partner at Mills & Reeve. “I’ve been greatly impressed with Recommind, both with its technology and the project team, which quickly became an extension of our own during the implementation. When embarking on a project with such powerful technology, we were somewhat concerned with opening ‘Pandora’s Box’ and unknowingly giving staff access to confidential information. Recommind worked closely with us, though, to lock down all of our sensitive information before going live with MindServer Search – and to date, we’ve experienced nothing but success.

“We are already seeing an exceedingly positive return on our investment, with employees saving time previously spent manually indexing information, and instead now focusing on more strategic, revenue generating, and billable work.”

The phased deployment, which began in March of this year, has been a huge success, with MindServer Search not only searching the firm’s intranet but also seamlessly integrating with its existing data repositories, including its Autonomy iManage document management system, Tikit Firmware practice management system, Lexis Nexis InterAction CRM database, Softlink library catalogue and the firm’s websites and extranets as well as the external PLC (Practical Law Company) knowledge service.

“The technology has been generating a lot of positive buzz in the firm, with tools like Matters & Expertise having already been a real eye opener to our employees who are now being given a greater opportunity to draw upon the experience of their colleagues,” continued Ogilvy. “And, seeing Recommind’s concept-based search in action has been truly staggering. Relying on the context of a search query, rather than on just the keywords themselves, has proved incredibly helpful in locating information at the drop of a hat – particularly with finding ‘needle in a haystack’ email for major litigation cases within the firm.”

By making the search user-friendly and easy to grasp, Mills & Reeve employees have at their fingertips a search tool to find know-how from a host of data sources – whether they are working within a document, drafting an email, or browsing the internet. Such intuitiveness has meant the firm has required no rigorous training sessions, but instead offered a series of short workshops for employees designed to show the opportunities available with the new system and to ensure they get the most out of it.

“This has been one of our most successful projects to date and it’s been very rewarding to see how much the technology has already impacted Mills & Reeve’s bottom line,” said Simon Price, European director at Recommind. “We’ve worked closely with Duncan and his team on every part of this rollout to ensure things have gone as smoothly as possible with no disruption to their employees’ every day working environment. With such complex implementations, it is critical to get them right from day one. Mills & Reeve understood the importance of this and had the right team and tools in place to help make that possible.”

Mills & Reeve already has further plans to create a database of all UK tenders ever submitted, and is working with Recommind to use MindServer Search to make this database completely searchable for employees. The firm is also currently testing Recommind’s unique QwikFind™ utility which will provide an embedded, easy-to-use search toolbar on the desktop and within all Microsoft Office applications.

About Mills & Reeve LLP

Mills & Reeve is a top 50 national law firm with 90 partners and a total staff of 800, operating from offices in Birmingham, Cambridge, Leeds, London, Manchester and Norwich. Mills & Reeve is a full service firm with practice specialisms including corporate and commercial, banking and finance, technology, insurance, real estate, healthcare, local authorities, education and private client. For more information visit www.mills-reeve.com.