Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren, a Wisconsin firm with 180 attorneys, installed West KM in June 2003 as part of a pilot program to evaluate it's usefulness for the firm. Carol Bannen, the firm's director of information resources, discusses their experience with West KM in the Law Technology News article, Evolving into Automation.
When trying to decide how to move forward with the firm's knowledge management system, they specifically looked for a solution that would help retrieve those documents that otherwise never would have made their way into their traditional work product library. "We realized we needed something to help us retrieve valuable work product - but it had to take much of the work out of the hands of the attorneys."
Carol says that their litigators were the biggest beneficiaries of the new system, and found the natural language searching to be particularly useful. The transactional attorneys at Reinhart were less inclined to use it, especially since they generally did not use Westlaw to the extent that the litigators did. This was prior to the release of West KM for transactions.
The bottom line according to Carol is "The ability to use Westlaw searching capability, to update any legal citations and to see easily when there is a Reinhart document citing a case has been invaluable to us and to our clients."
Leave a comment