vLex launch new knowledge management feature for legal professionals

Global News

20
Oct
2020

Editor

Law firms around the world can now expand their legal research by uploading their own documents to vLex Cloud and combine their knowledge with vLex’s global collection of legal information to create a research resource personalised to the needs of the firm and their clients. The first of its kind, vLex Cloud represents a seismic change for legal researchers across the world.

The connectivity between internal and external legal knowledge will enhance research effectiveness, while enabling lawyers to locate the most important information with a single search. 

vLex Cloud also offers the ability for legal professionals to easily share documents with colleagues and teams, and manage their firm’s legal knowledge, with a privacy-first design ensuring that firms remain in control of their own documents.

A comprehensive search experience

From sole practitioners to large law firms, whether in an office or working remotely, documents can be added to vLex Cloud by an individual researcher for their own use only, or made available by an account administrator across a whole organisation so that a firm’s internal knowledge is available to the whole team whenever or wherever it is needed.

This will make a law firm’s internal knowledge available alongside the world’s largest collections of common and civil law legal information, creating a unique, comprehensive resource for every firm, which is accessible through a single search. 

By combining their valuable documents with the extensive collection of legal information offered by vLex, practitioners will benefit from the most efficient search of legal information possible. This will save considerable time by avoiding the need to navigate multiple databases and platforms to locate the most relevant information.

vLex services will also learn which internal documents a user engages with the most and will adjust the search ranking so that important information is always presented in the top search results.

Designed for privacy 

vLex Cloud has been designed to ensure that uploaded documents remain private. 

Any document uploaded to vLex Cloud by an individual will only be available to them and will appear in their search results only. Documents can be deleted at any time, and no archived version will remain on vLex services. Organisations will always be in control of their own documents.

Enriching internal knowledge

Adding documents to vLex Cloud is made simple through the use of connectors such as Dropbox, with other services including OneDrive, Google Drive and Box coming soon. Once connected, powerful AI analysis, automatic linking and document enrichment tools, uniquely available from vLex and trained with the world’s largest collections of legal information will enrich a firm’s documents. This process identifies legal citations in personal documents, adds links to authorities on vLex services, and makes intelligent recommendations when reading legal documents.

Automatic linking allows lawyers to quickly review legal citations in their documents, and verify that the cases they cite are still precedents they can rely on.

Powerful classification systems identify the areas of law that connected documents relate to, so that they can be searched for alongside relevant case law, legislation, and other legal information documents within vLex. 

Researchers also benefit from vLex workflow tools such as in-document annotations, notes and organisational features to better manage their internal documents.

Human search at machine speed

Any document connected to vLex Cloud can also be used with Vincent, vLex’s AI-powered legal research assistant. By using artificial intelligence to understand the semantic meanings in a document, and conducting hundreds of searchers in a matter of seconds to identify highly related material, Vincent offers a comprehensive search experience and identifies information that traditional searching can miss. 

Robin Chesterman, Global Head of Product for vLex, discussed the power of vLex Cloud: “Law firms of any size have their own library of documents, which contains important information that can be relevant to their research. vLex Cloud makes that information more accessible than ever before, with a single search showing highly relevant documents from internal knowledge repositories alongside our global database of legal information. This will save significant amounts of research time, and can transform the legal research process.”