Legal Knowledge Management To Drive Dealmaking – Above the … – Above the Law
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When drafting documents for a current or upcoming deal, transactional attorneys need to pull from the best resources available to them. Often, that means reviewing the most effective language used for similar deals.
But not every document management system is up to the task of a deep search, and the documents containing the best language might not always come from inside an attorney’s own firm or legal department.
Lexis Search Advantage | Transactional offers a solution to time consuming, piecemeal internal and external document searches through algorithms that mark up and search both internal documents and publicly available SEC filings, all within the same secure tabbed interface.
LSA Transactional’s core feature is a thorough search process that utilizes algorithms from Intelligize, a web-based research platform designed specifically for transactions and compliance professionals acquired by LexisNexis in 2016.
LSA Transactional takes the Intelligize algorithms — renowned for their highly effective combing of the SEC’s EDGAR database — and applies them to internal documents as well, returning results from both public SEC filings and the user’s own organization.
Unlike the search procedures for many legal research products, a search conducted in LSA Transactional typically starts with pre-search filters.
In practice, this means starting a search is quite literally as simple as clicking the button labeled, for example, “Merger Agreement,” to generate a list of matching work products.
Approaching the search from this angle ensures that the first pass of a search covers all available documents, and additional post-search filters allow attorneys to drill down to more exact results with the knowledge that they’ve left no stone unturned.
One useful post-search filter limits results by a certain deal point, such as the size of a deal. In all, users can take advantage of 84 different deal points across seven document types to find exactly what they need.
Another filter is available for 78 of the recognized document types and allows users to narrow their results to only documents containing a specific type of clause.
The clause filter is a great tool if, for example, an attorney has been asked to draft a warrant agreement and isn’t sure of the best way to phrase the payment of taxes clause. The filter allows them to quickly find and reference examples of what has worked before to get the ball rolling.
In addition to the standard set of filters, LSA Transactional customers can coordinate custom search filters with the Lexis installation team when setting up the program for their own firm or legal department.
Of course, the option to conduct a boolean or keyword search is still available.
LSA Transactional keeps pace with the results-sharing capabilities featured in many LexisNexis products.
Users have four options to export their results. First, they can send a link via email that will open the results page in LSA Transactional on the recipient’s device. Alternatively, users can copy and paste a selection of links into an email or other application. A third option allows users to download all their results as a .ZIP file.
Lastly, users can export their results as an Excel spreadsheet. Search results exported to Excel will include the full text of useful content, making this format excellent for finalizing how the results will be used for drafting a new document.
For example, if a user selected six versions of a particular type of clause to reference during their drafting process, they can review their results side-by-side to spot key differences and decide on the best language for the draft at hand.
In addition to its options for sharing search results, LSA Transactional includes a tagging feature that allows users to earmark the most useful documents for a particular purpose.
While users can take advantage of private tagging for their own reference, organization-wide tags can allow teams to create collections of relevant documents for their own use.
The LSA Transactional installation process is highly tailored to a customer’s needs and is done on a secure server behind the client’s own firewall. This allows for a high level of security against external attempts to access internal information.
From there, LSA Transactional can integrate with popular document management systems like iManage or NetDocuments. The program’s algorithms treat these documents just like SEC filings, converting them into HTML files and marking them up for relevant terms and phrases.
The Lexis software pulls document properties and security from the document management system, meaning that attorneys will only see documents they have clearance for in their search results.
To keep document security as up to date as possible, customers can choose to have LSA Transactional check for new document versions as often as every 15 minutes.
And, even if one user shares a list of search results with a colleague who doesn’t have access to all the results selected for sharing, LSA Transactional will prompt a security check for those inaccessible documents from the shared list.
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