Pinpoint SMS, Legal Edition

As in all of Pinpoint's total solutions, the Legal Edition starts with either the Pinpoint SMS 100 or SMS 200 appliance (the SMS 200 is shown below) and adds specific applications, capabilities, and connectors to uniquely address legal vertical marketplace needs. The Pinpoint SMS, Legal Edition addresses SOHO and SMB legal office requirements. The additions include the following as shown in Figure 1:

• E-mail application
  
• LexisNexis and Westlaw connectors for their Internet-based aggregated content
  
• Legal business and RSS feed Internet websites access
  
• Legal-specific documents spidered from the Internet; custom, pre-indexed database for immediate search support
  
• Corpus with legal focus
  
• Structured content access
  
• Collaboration support for cross Internet collaboration with clients and legal partners
  
• Tabbed results viewer that supports LAN-based document content, LexisNexis and Westlaw pre-indexed law content, and e-mail
  

Figure 1. Pinpoint SMS, Legal Edition.

E-Mail Application

The e-mail application supports the indexing of message content, metadata access (to:, from:, bcc:, subject), and attachments including zip file types. The zip file is unrolled, and the zipped file content is indexed also. Parent/child threads are also saved, and a special display shows the origins of e-mail threads along with all of the e-mail "paths". The e-mail application search results are displayed in a separate tab.

LexisNexis and Westlaw Connectors

These connectors enable access to Intenet-based, aggregated file-oriented databases, specifically LexisNexis and Westlaw databases. These two database search results are displayed under their own tab. Background access and billing information is handled by these plug-ins. The number of similar documents and allocated time are programmable keeping aggregated database costs down or at least monitored.

Legal Internet Web Access and Custom Database

The legal edition supports a separate collection of legal-related, free articles and resources pre-indexed gathered from the Internet. This custom, indexed database may include RSS feeds updated regularly, newspaper articles compared against selected keywords, etc.

Hummingbird Connector

The Hummingbird connector enables Pinpoint access to metadata and content managed by the Interwoven ECM suite. Hummingbird Enterprise is an integrated enterprise content management (ECM) suite. It provides corporate counsel with document and records management, team collaboration, portal, knowledge management, workflow, reporting, and e-mail management tools to build content-centric solutions that address a variety of content and compliance related issues

Interwoven Connector

The Interwoven connector enables Pinpoint access to metadata and content managed by the Interwoven ECM suite. Interwoven delivers deep domain expertise-based ECM (enterprise content management)vsolutions, on top of industry platforms. These solutions automate specific business-processes around unstructured content in professional services and financial services verticals as well as line-of-business departments. Interwoven is one of two main choices for data management within legal vertical applications.

Legal Corpus

The Pinpoint corpus consists of a special lexicon, abbreviations, proper nouns, and a thesaurus that are built specifically for the legal profession. The corpus is used to help parse (break apart) natural language input (a complete sentence input formed into a query) into phrases used for the actual search.

Structured Content Access

Structed content access means the ability to query an actual database using, in our case, natural language query inputs. Field priority and record ranges assist in making Pinpoint's structured content access "fuzzy" guaranteeing results that are exact and "close". The NLP database query bypasses typical "boxed" inputs that have been pre-designed across a number of parameters to yield a database result. This NLP approach frees the user from constrained searches found in current database input screens.

Collaboration Content

This Pinpoint capability converts the search management system into a private portal with access granted to collaborators across the Internet. A common, indexed database of all pertinent and shared content is indexed into a collaboration database. Content can come from the LAN locally, aggregated file databases from the Internet, and/or from fellow collaborator's internal content across the Internet.

Tabbed Viewer Results

E-mail results, LexisNexis and Westlaw results, and LAN-based file content results are individually displayed using tabs enabling searches based on the concept of groups. Each tab displays results for each group. Searches can be further refined within each group using the concept of collections. Each group can have multiple collections thus personally tailoring the displayed results even further.