Easy access to valuable knowledge assets enables firm’s professionals to tap into the collective intelligence of the organisation wherever they work

For its legal teams, Burges Salmon has successfully deployed iManage Knowledge Unlocked, modernising knowledge management support.

This was driven by the desire to strengthen support for the quality of its services by making collective knowledge and publications more easily accessible to its lawyers.  In particular, the firm was looking to improve access to content created and curated by its legal and knowledge teams.

“We already have a huge amount of knowledge and experience to make more accessible for legal teams. The pandemic has led to us thinking about how we might also increase support for tacit knowledge going forward,” says Carol Aldridge, Head of Knowledge Management at Burges Salmon. “This project has been driven by the needs of our users and knowledge teams and our focus on structuring and organising knowledge and information in a way that works more intuitively for them.”

Burges Salmon chose Knowledge Unlocked because of its capability to provide an end-to-end knowledge management that will truly facilitate a culture of knowledge sharing.

“Burges Salmon has a fantastic knowledge team in place, that understands the organisational and cultural issues around knowledge management,” comments Jack Shepherd, Principal Business Consultant at iManage. “We’ve worked hard with Carol and her team around metadata and content. Lots of people think these kinds of projects are just about the technology, and this project shows that quality of content and how well it is organised, have a huge impact – alongside all the other business processes that underpin a knowledge management system.”

The Knowledge Unlocked solution strengthens Burges Salmon’s established iManage Work document and email management capabilities through iManage Insight knowledge search interface, and Lexsoft T3 – a taxonomy and curation workflow product from iManage partner, Lexsoft Systems.

“It has been a pleasure to work with iManage, its partners and the Burges Salmon Project Team to deliver this comprehensive knowledge management solution,” says Carlos García-Egocheaga, CEO at Lexsoft Systems. “Their experts took a consultative approach to redesign the workflows with us across the lifecycle of the knowledge documents and to redefine the metadata models. This ensures that the Knowledge Unlocked solution provides the most efficient knowledge management capabilities to users at Burges Salmon.”

Overall, the project has taken just eight months to go live with Knowledge Unlocked. Including initial preparation by a Core PSL team working closely with the firm’s IT lead, Burges Salmon was able to move nearly 20,000 knowledge documents out of its old knowledge management system, within the first month of the project.  A careful focus on business process design and change management, in conjunction with the deployment of the actual technology, was key to the firm’s rapid time to launch.

“Given our relatively small Project Team, we are thrilled to be introducing iManage Knowledge Unlocked to increase support for our legal teams and clients in such a short space of time,” concluded Aldridge.