Robert Ambrogi Blog
A Ravel Law search conducted from within a Handshake portal.
Handshake Software yesterday announced that it now has an integration partnership with the legal research platform Ravel Law. That announcement comes a month after Handshake announced its integration with West km, the Thomson Reuters knowledge management platform.
The integrations enable lawyers whose firms use Handshake to directly search Ravel and West km from within their firm intranets.
Law firms use Handshake’s products to create intranet and extranet portals built using Microsoft SharePoint. It offers pre-defined integrations for many enterprise-level applications commonly used in larger law firms. These integrations make it easy for firms to set up intranets that integrate all of their financial, practice, content management and client management records within a single framework.
That integration makes all the information searchable and accessible from within the intranet, based on Handshake’s enterprise search product for Sharepoint, SP Bridge. Handshake already had integration partnerships with products such as The Firm Directory, news-monitoring service Manzama, document-management systems iManage and NetDocuments, and LexisNexis.
The West km integration provides access to a product that organizes and enhances a firm’s internal documents to make them easier to find and use. When you run a Westlaw search with West km installed, the search results include not only material from Westlaw, but also matching briefs, pleadings and documents from the firm’s internal DMS. In addition to retrieving relevant documents, West km enhances them by adding KeyCite flags, hyperlinking citations to the source documents in Westlaw, and adding icons that alert to other relevant
In addition to retrieving relevant documents, West km enhances them by adding KeyCite flags, hyperlinking citations to the source documents in Westlaw, and adding icons that alert to other relevant documents within the firm’s collection.
The Ravel Law integration enables lawyers to access Ravel Law’s research, visualization and analytics tools from within their firm intranet. This means that lawyers can manage both business and legal aspects of their practices from within a single environment.
In a recent conversation, Glenn LaForce, vice president of global sales and marketing at Handshake, told me that the company’s goal for its customers is to bring together all of the resources lawyers use into a single environment. With SP Bridge, a lawyer can search universally across a firm’s enterprise applications or select specific ones. Searches can also be refined by office, language or a variety of other facets.
Lawyers can customize their homepages to highlight the applications and information they most frequently use. They can add in gadgets to monitor everything from their monthly billing to their Twitter feeds.
“What we’re really about is making an intranet someone’s personalized space,” said LaForce.