In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an email archiving appliance, a Web-based time-billing solution, and a powerful desktop search tool. Don't miss the next issue.
Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:
The Renaissance Man of Desktop Search Tools
By Dennis Kennedy
Lawyers spend an increasing amount of time searching. While cynics might quip that lawyers spend much of that time looking for misplaced files (both electronic and paper), even the most organized lawyers need to search their hard drives and networks as well as discovery documents — and the free desktop search tools often fall short.
ISYS Search Software's ISYS 8 moves law firms well beyond the realm of free desktop search tools into powerful and versatile search technology. ISYS 8 offers a wide array of tools that enable you to find the information you need fast whether it resides on your PC, a file server, or elsewhere on your local or wide area network.
ISYS 8 works with your unstructured data as it finds it, including email. In fact, it can index and search data in more than 200 file formats (including Office 2007) in 60 languages, and each index can accommodate up to 64 million documents. You do not have to prepare your data before indexing it. You can, however, select from a number of indexing options, and automate indexing with a scheduler. For example, you could have ISYS index your email and attachments every hour.
ISYS 8 gives you a wide range of search options from the familiar standard keyword search to Boolean operators to useful options like "Starts with" and "Sounds like." ISYS 8's "Intelligent Agent" can even automatically perform searches for you and notify you of new results. ISYS also uses "fuzzy logic" to help you find "mis-shaped" words from OCR scans and "Synonym Rings" enables you to engage in "concept searching" — finding documents that contain terms related to your search terms (e.g., nicknames, synonyms, etc.). For email and other structured files, you can search by fields such as TO, CC, and BCC.
In addition to fast and powerful search, ISYS enables you to navigate and work with your results in many helpful ways. You can search within your initial results, filter or automatically categorize results, highlight, group, or cluster hits, set views or previews, and hide results that do not matter to you. ISYS 8 has a "Did You Mean?" feature to suggest alternative search terms for you. You can annotate your results, print or extract them to a file, and even search metadata.
ISYS 8 boasts a number of new features that should prove quite helpful with many legal tasks. Regarding electronic discovery, the "Entities" feature can identify people, organizations, email addresses, and similar information in your search results and group the documents you find accordingly. For knowledge management, ISYS 8's new "Best Bets" feature enables you to designate model documents for certain search terms. And for large firms, "ISYS Federator" can synchronize indexes across the network and even across the globe so that everyone in the firm obtains the same search results.
ISYS 8 costs $1,000 for a network license plus $100 per seat with volume discounts available. Learn more about ISYS 8.
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