2021 KM PROMISE AWARD WINNER: iManage

Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. One of the greatest challenges for organizations purchasing these technologies is to determine which of these companies will deliver on this promise. This award is given to the organization that is delivering this promise to its customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are embedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.

2021 KM Promise Award Winner: iManage

During the KMWorld Connect 2021 conference, iManage was announced as the winner of the 2021 KM Promise Award. iManage delivers solutions that help knowledge workers and their organizations to achieve better business outcomes. Its intelligent, cloud-enabled, knowledge work platform helps companies to uncover and activate the knowledge that exists inside their business content and communications, helping to solve complex challenges for more than one million professionals at 3,700-plus organizations.

“The massive volumes of data and knowledge that exists within organizations today make finding, sharing, and reusing critical knowledge a time-consuming process that can drain productivity,” said Nick Thomson, general manager, AI, iManage. “This award is great validation of the impact iManage Knowledge Unlocked is having on empowering knowledge workers and their organizations to activate knowledge hidden within their content and systems to deliver powerful, data-driven insights and outcomes. We applaud KMWorld for its commitment to highlighting solutions and strategies across KM and content and document management that assist tech professionals and executives in making critical business decisions.”

Unlocking knowledge

iManage Knowledge Unlocked is a solution that brings together various KM and AI capabilities, including classification, search, and machine learning, in an integrated package, taking what would previously have been individual products and combining them to solve specific KM problems with greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

The solution helps users discover relevant content across disparate systems. It goes beyond the content stored in the document management system to incorporate other sources of institutional, analytical, and third-party practical knowledge. With Knowledge Unlocked users can automatically map search results to a defined taxonomy and use the iManage Knowledge Graph to surface connections between people, expertise, and knowledge to identify hidden experts, related projects, best practices, precedents, contextually relevant content and clients.

The modern architecture makes it easy to deploy, and speeds adoption allowing customers to realize value quickly whether in the cloud or on premise. When integrated with business intelligence tools like Microsoft Power BI, it provides knowledge teams with powerful analytics. iManage APIs and a library of connectors enable integration with third-party sources to seamlessly extend the platform. A robust connector framework and data transformation module reduces the need for expensive technical resources.

Knowledge Unlocked uniquely provides users with seven ways to search and allows users to “context switch” while searching to enable them to successfully and seamlessly connect the dots across their knowledge and data. Advanced security and governance support knowledge sharing even in the most restricted need-to-know environments.

Seven ways to search

The seven search experiences can broadly be classified into three groupings: analytical knowledge, curated knowledge, and user-encountered knowledge:

Analytical knowledge helps wrangle knowledge by analyzing existing documents in order to connect and surface information that aids in leveraging best practices or in identifying experts or expertise.

• Matter locator—the ability to discover similar matters and reuse relevant content such as contracts, billing profiles, or experts.
• Expert locator—the ability to identify experts and make connections between their knowledge and related documents using machine learning to analyze content and activities.
• Deal locator—the ability to search for, and across, deal documents to enable visibility to business metrics as they relate to matters and clients.

Curated knowledge often takes the form of templates, starting points, checklists, and other assets that ensure professionals don’t have to start from a blank page when tackling a new assignment.

• Clause locator—the ability to find pro forma and best practice clauses from knowledge content and create unified best practices specific to clause type.
• Knowledge locator—the ability to assemble best practices to easily find your firm’s recommended content, market insights, and latest legal principles.

How users interface with and access knowledge:

• Search and find—knowledge search, powered by the iManage Knowledge Graph, makes connections across people, data, and content to provide the most relevant results.
• Recommendations—enable users to quickly find relevant and contextual information based on the workspaces they have access to, the people they work with, and what they search for, making it easy to stay current and access the content that can help them get their jobs done faster.

To help organizations implement their solutions, iManage serves as a strategic partner to its customers, often working closely with them to help define their specific KM needs, scope the solution, and advise on change management, adoption and deployment goals. As former practicing lawyers from some of the most elite firms, iManage KM/AI practice leads have an understanding of what legal organizations and lawyers need for successful KM initiatives. This understanding, combined with deep expertise in KM and AI tech solutions, equips them to ensure that firms and their staff can take full advantage of the value of Knowledge Unlocked. In addition, the company has a customer success and on-boarding team that is dedicated to ensuring successful deployment.

Customer success

Knowledge Unlocked not only has helped firms generate time savings and financial savings, but it also frees knowledge workers to work on other projects by automating important but tedious and time-consuming work. After deploying a proprietary Knowledge Management system known as MatterExplorer, based on the iManage Knowledge Unlocked, global law firm Linklaters reported a 400% increase in search utilization, and 15,416 hours saved in a 6-month period, as search time was reduced from hours to seconds. These internal benefits are turning into cost saving and productivity enhancing results, with another firm reporting a 20%-30% reduction in drafting time and an increase in quality and consistency of advice as a result of improved search

In addition, transatlantic law firm Womble Bond Dickinson is leveraging AI-powered search to reveal knowledge and relationships across it 1,000 lawyers and 75 million documents, helping to streamline financial operations. AI brings together data from time and billing systems, fee earner biographies, work product history, know-how, and other pieces of information, enabling the firm to work more efficiently and better serve their clients. “Our firm has never put into practice a search system this powerful. The fact that our lawyers can so quickly locate material knowledge and, in turn, make that knowledge actionable is a game-changer—both in how we operate internally and in how we serve our clients,” said Bill Koch, chief knowledge officer, Womble Bond Dickinson (U.S.).