EAGAN, Minn. – One of the keys to effective knowledge management is delivering the most relevant legal research results with a single query. A new strategic relationship between Thomson Reuters, the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, and Handshake Software, the leading provider of SharePoint-based products and services to the legal sector, will significantly improve users’ search experience.

The partnership will combine West km 5.0, the leading knowledge management system for the legal profession, with Handshake Software’s SP Bridge, which extends SharePoint Search to a firm’s enterprise platform. Using Handshake’s rich Relationship Toolkit, SP Bridge extrapolates and relates information from multiple systems, creating a powerful set of search results and refiners.

West km will identify and extract legally relevant metadata, such as judge, jurisdiction, court, attorneys, law firms, etc., and allow users to apply multiple filters using West km criteria for more effective searching. And users can use the SP Bridge search interface with which they are already familiar to quickly and intuitively find the most relevant answers from the firm or organization’s existing work product, as well as other relevant information from the firm’s line of business systems.

“The combination of West km with SP Bridge means users can better leverage their existing intellectual capital to find the most relevant answer, and ultimately, produce better work product more efficiently,” said Craig Larson, vice president of productivity solutions, Thomson Reuters. “Speed and accuracy are becoming more important as organizations produce greater volumes of output. This partnership delivers the most on-point results, improving quality and efficiency, and leverages the unique characteristics of legal content to help get the most out of investments in enterprise tools.”

“Bringing together West km with our enterprise search environment further creates a one-stop shop for all of an organization’s key in-house information resources,” said Glenn LaForce, vice president of global sales & marketing at Handshake Software. “Attorney efficiency is greatly improved through this integration and it further enhances our longstanding relationship with Thomson Reuters.”

Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com