Leading Law Firm Builds Search-Based Apps Across Practices

The Challenge

During the past 10 years, economic uncertainties and geopolitical challenges have increased competition among legal services providers globally. The pressure to do more with less has forced a growing number of law firms to assess how technology solutions can help them perform more effectively and more efficiently.

One of the biggest challenges facing Skadden’s law practitioners in recent years has been retrieving information from many different collections and sources, both internally and externally. Across the geographically distributed firm, thousands of lawyers need to find information and expertise – quickly and on a regular basis – that is buried within millions of documents spread over multiple silos within the organization. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that some of the highest value information is locked behind the so-called “ethics wall” and only accessible by partners at the firm.

One notable but subtle aspect of this application concerns security, specifically the platform’s ability to include restricted content in the computation underlying the application without revealing the restricted content to unauthorized users. This gives Skadden the best of both worlds, i.e. the ability to leverage high-value sensitive information to connect experts across the organization while at the same time enforcing access controls and protecting restricted content.