After many months of teasing the arrival of semantic search at scale, NetDocuments at Inspire EMEA demonstrated its new capability, which, combined with wide-scale AI auto-profiling, has the potential to make content across the DMS radically more discoverable than ever before.
While NetDocuments has for some time had a semantic index within its legal AI assistant (enabling users to search by meaning rather than just keywords) it can be slow and there is a limit to how many documents it can analyse.
Now, semantic search is available across the DMS, opening up possibilities not just for lawyers searching for documents, but for agentic AI tools to search, retrieve and take actions based upon the documents they find.
Giving a demonstration to me at Inspire EMEA, director of product management, Scott Kelly, enacted a sports entertainment attorney looking for a precedent they worked on years ago and are hazy on the detail. Running a key word search returned zero results and Kelly said: “They might spend hours looking for the needle in the haystack.” If you search for a sports endorsement deal using a semantic and keyword search, that then transforms the findability of documents. Academic literature suggests that the best-in-class search is a combination of semantic and key word search, and these will run simultaneously.
The new search capability ties in with NetDocuments’ ability now to run AI profiling at scale in the background, so that firms can accurately label hundreds of millions of documents, creating accurate and granular metadata. Until recently this has been done by batch on a smaller scale, is this really possible on a wide scale, I wanted to know. “We have firms already running millions of documents through AI Profiling,” said Kelly.
During a public demo session at Inspire, vice president of product Jill Schornack said: “The scale of this is going to blow your mind.”
NetDocuments has been working closely with Elasticsearch and AWS to make this new capability possible and are doing a global phased roll out to customers. Smaller firms are likely to go first – or at least not large firms that use FlexStore to store files regionally.
Maurice Tunney, director of technology and innovation at UK law firm Keystone Law, told me: “The new AI search looks amazing. It will save so much time especially for lawyers looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The current search works well if you know what you are looking for, but as you know, that isn’t always how life works. The semantic search takes searching to a whole new level! And then when you link it with the ndAssistant enhancements coming – it really starts to give the lawyers powerful tools. They will be able to use their own extensive know-how and expertise contained within the DMS to create better documents for clients in a far quicker, more efficient, and more consistent way. The days where a document management system is just a secure, static, and centralised repository are numbered.”
As always, in terms of who signs up and when, in reality much will come down to how much NetDocuments charges for this new functionality. Tunney adds: “How NetDocuments will charge for it and how the commercials look is a different conversation.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com
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