Knowledge management needs in the legal sector, why Linklaters decided to move away from its legacy KM search engine, Kin+Carta's management of the migration process, and how the switch revitalised a well-established system and opened up new possibilities for its future development.

1. Modernising One Legal Se@rch with Elastic
James Pilgrim
Senior Knowledge Systems Manager, Linklaters
James Suart
Senior Consultant and Account Manager, Kin + Carta
June 2021

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Kin + Carta at a glance
Kin + Carta is…
➢ A digital transformation company, arranged as 3 key pillars:
• Advise – Management Consultancy
• Create – Software Products
• Connect – Marketing Agency and CX
➢ A ‘Connective’ of 1,600+ digital experts, spread over 3 continents with offices worldwide
➢ A FTSE250 business, B-Corp certified in US (with Europe to follow)

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Linklaters at a glance
5,340
staff
2,420
qualified lawyers
(excluding partners)
480
partners
30
offices in
20
countries

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Knowledge Systems at Linklaters
The goal of
knowledge is
to provide
our people
with:
The right knowledge
Access in as simple way as possible
At the right time
In the right format
What do knowledge systems do?
They are devoted to the identification, curation and maintenance of the firm’s legal knowledge, and to efficient and secure storage,
retrieval, sharing, and usage of these key resources.
Knowledge Systems support the firm’s goal of
delivering ‘legal certainty in a changing world’ to
our clients.
In particular, the focus is on actively curated,
readily accessible legal knowledge, which:
▪ increases the efficiency of matter delivery
▪ improves the quality of our client service
▪ reduces the risks of incorrect advice
“Delivering the knowledge and expertise of the whole firm to every matter.”

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One Legal Se@rch
260,000 Hand-picked knowledge documents
210,000 Articles from external sources
155,000 Resources in our library system
55,000 Legal Blog posts
32,000 Precedents and Manuals and Guides
11,000 Client publications
3,000 Videos
1,500 Knowhow Online pages
• It takes seconds to search over all
documents, web pages, and more.
Fast
• You can search across the entire
collection, or focus on a specific group.
Flexible
• Searches the complete content of
documents.
Full-text
• Se@rch supports 17 languages.
Multilingual
• Se@rch uses DMS permissions to
control access to legal knowledge.
Secure
Se@rch gives users one starting point to find documents from
the firm’s global collection of curated legal knowledge.

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One Legal Se@rch

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Migrating OLS to Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE)
The Problem:
OLS had run for many years on a legacy backend. This platform was highly complex and also being sunset for support – so Linklaters had to
choose between a) carrying on with unsupported technology (and potentially having to replace the entire stack to an unwelcome deadline) or b)
migrating the backend to another platform, whilst maintaining BAU for the users.
The Solution:
Linklaters chose to migrate and after a successful POC, Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) was selected as the new platform for OLS. The
rationale for this included…
➢ Business rationale:
▪ Extending the useful life of OLS for many more years
▪ Maintaining cross-language support and complex security models
▪ Gain improved insight into query/ranking behaviours
▪ Open Source solution meant no upfront license fee
▪ Scalability – allow for future expansion in terms of collections and document counts
➢ IT/Support rationale:
▪ Benefit from vendor support with the new platform (Elastic)
▪ Exert fine control of the backend and maintenance procedures (via ECE orchestration and Kibana interface)

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Immediate Wins (Business and IT)
▪ Performance – up to 10x faster query response, higher user satisfaction/better UX
▪ Infrastructure – collapsed previous server footprint by 67%, lower operating costs
▪ Reliability – simplified architecture has meant better uptime, fewer outages and easier
maintenance by relevant teams
▪ Orchestration – centralised DevOps deployment of updates/patches across environments

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Additional Business Wins
▪ Better handling of multilingual collections – more relevant results for users in global offices
▪ Transparency – better visibility of how query results get ranked, and tools to tweak/influence
this, again improving relevance of search results
▪ Scaling – ECE makes it simple to add capacity for additional collections or document sets
▪ Roadmap – although the front end is very mature code (10+ years), the modernised ECE
backend gives Linklaters a solid platform on which to build a re-imagined front end in future

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Conclusion
In partnership with Kin + Carta Create, Linklaters have future-proofed their One Legal Se@rch
(Knowledge Management) platform for many years to come.
Please contact Kin + Carta if you have a Search use case to discuss – we are an Elastic
certified partner with decades of collective expertise in Enterprise Search.
https://www.kinandcarta.com
Thank you for your time, we hope you enjoy the next presentation…