ILTA does the best job of offering educational seminars all year round of any association I've been involved with. You don't always have to be a member to benefit; the webinar they're offering, "When One Search is Not Enough: Case Studies in Using Multiple Work Product Retrieval Tools" is open to non-members, so whether you join, and you probably should, or not, you can also benefit.
We all know that there's no such thing as the one perfect work product solution. Every application has its weaknesses and strong points. Though the vendors are trying to come up with a one size fits all approach, they don't necessarily succeed. Some tools may work better for litigation, others for corporate documents. One search engine might do a great job of relevancy ranking, but lacks some other feature that you think is critical. Though no one wants the expense, the reality is that purchasing just work product retrieval tool may not be enough.
Now, how to convince your management of that is a whole other topic!
By the way, I went to a similar program last year at AALL. Even if you are only planning on purchasing one product, you can get no better information on how the different ones out there stack up than by listening to people who are working with more than one search tool. They know the comparative strengths and weaknesses like nobody else!
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