Canadian Lawyer - sample

22 M A Y 2 0 1 9 w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m S earch is one of those wicked problems. Not "wicked" in the English vernacular sense though. And it's not the OED definition of the word of "evil or morally bad" either. More, as Roger Martin of the Rotman School defines them: as "messy and reactive, and with no single solution." Search has many moving parts. Building a search application really is a messy business, and it requires an obsessive attention to detail. "Simple, fast and rel- evant" do not come easily in a search project. Google makes it look so easy though. In less than a second, I can bring back millions of results on any topic I choose — from learning to spatchcock a chicken to finding the funniest meme about the Brexit fiasco (a submarine of cheese anyone?!). Search is often the very first resort for many on the Interwebs. It has changed the way we find everything: products, knowledge, answers, services, people and places. It shapes the way we interact with organizations and the way we think about the world. Search within the enterprise is slightly less profound than that but no less challenging to get right. It is often a source of endless irritation and the complaints of "I can't find anything" echo down the halls of more than just L E G A L I N N O VA T I O N N O W SEARCHING A HAYSTACK By Kate Simpson our law firms. And while there are those who think everything is just fine and dandy with what they have, they may not know what riches await with a better search engine, better data, a better interface or using better search query language. As I move into the final stages of develop- ment for our new enterprise search system, I have been looking back over the years at the eight search implementations with which I have been involved — from early Verity and Autonomy to SharePoint, BA Insight and internally built search solutions and from Recommind to new Insight Search from iManage. I am reminded just how mature the market has become and how important it is to get the basics right (find a docu- ment, fast) but also to support the deep topic research journeys that also happen at our firms. Moreover, the new tech now allows us to go deeper to create an environment where search is central to information-seeking and decision-making at our firms, where search can uncover insights in the data, make ser- endipitous connections between things and inform you of things that you didn't know you needed to know. For "Search: The Next Generation" to hap- pen, however, we need to understand informa- tion- and knowledge-seeking behaviours. We need to design search screens that promote instant retrieval, while also supporting the deep and cerebral research of our lawyers. We need to design screens that can help us see the Enterprise search needs to be simple to use; designing it is anything but @k8simpson O P I N I O N

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