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w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m M A Y 2 0 1 9 23 O P I N I O N patterns and trends for even deeper insights about the firm and its expertise. Oh, and all those screens need to be simple, clean and intuitive. Wicked search. Between them, Apple and Google have set the standards for simplicity by design. And, luckily for us, the search vendors in our market have sought to mimic them. They may not deliver the same slick user experience as Amazon or Google, but given the difference in resources, we should be impressed all the same. Back in the mid-2000s, I remember spending hours learning the verity query language to more deeply research and audit a law firm's document and knowledge collections. As an expert researcher using VQL, you could spend quite some time care- fully crafting syntax-heavy search strings. You could use a com- bination of proximity operators, wildcards and Boolean to be super-specific about what you were looking for (eg. (sharehold- ers AND agreement) AND (NOT Rubble) AND "Flintstones Financing"~5). It was oddly pleasing. The vendors realized, however, that you could push all that search complexity into the back of the engine to present a much cleaner experience on the front. This led to those "advanced search" links to a page that presented a combination of fields for the user to complete: one for exact terms and one where you could list the terms to be ignored, as well as for phrase search- ing, stemming, etc. This presented a cleaner and simpler screen for users but with links to other pages for those on a deeper search adventure. It also means that many people today have only the vaguest sense of the term "Boolean." Other "advanced search" forms would present lawyers with specific fields they could use to search the content — things such as title, document type, date, client/matter and author fields. If you know that the word "shareholders" will be in the title of the document and you know that the author was Wilma Flintstone, you could retrieve a more precise set of results to pore over. Most of these advanced search forms have (sadly) disappeared as the power of the algorithms improved and the ability to filter search results came along. Faceted search changed the way we find music and books online, shop for hardware or buy second-hand goods. Sud- denly, it meant that you could stick any old word in the search box and then filter the search results down to a more precise selection by using, for example, topic, department or date fields. Enterprise search vendors quickly followed suit. But if you chat to any content management expert at a law firm, you will quickly learn about the pain this change in search caused. We had to develop new schemas and normalize taxonomies across collections; we had to clean up poorly tagged documents and hide the rest using vague descriptors. I have been personally promised on more than one occasion over the past 15 years that I need not do any of that cleanup, that no-one needs to classify documents anymore. That there's this one fully- automated-luxury-unicorn that can do all that for me, automagically. But I am yet to be impressed. Law firms have a variety of data, informa- tion and knowledge — some in an unstructured mess, some in a semi-structured semi-mess and some in a highly structured and curated thing of beauty. The more structured the content, the more that search can leverage these tags to reveal more mean- ingful and richer knowledge — but only if search can merge the very best aspects of knowledge engineering already present at our firms. The taxonomies, ontologies, linked data and knowl- edge graphs all need to be part of this wicked problem we're trying to solve called search. Kate Simpson is national director of knowledge management at Bennett Jones LLP. Opinions expressed are her own. "The taxonomies, ontologies, linked data and knowledge graphs all need to be part of this wicked problem we're trying to solve called search." Legal News at Your Fingertips Sign up for the Canadian Legal Newswire today for free and enjoy great content from the publishers of Canadian Lawyer, Law Times, Canadian Lawyer InHouse and Lexpert. Visit www.canadianlawyermag.com/newswire-subscribe THE LATEST NEWS THE BEST COMMENTARY DELIVERED WEEKLY FOR READING ON ANY DEVICE ntitled-3 1 2019-04-24 4:05 PM

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