Sika’s legal department urgently needs a fast and reliable search function across its entire (legal) archive. As a result, Sika decided to optimise their documents even more and make sure that all possible results would be included in the search results.

As a first step, all documents and e-mails are stored in the legal matters in Custodian and for that reason, the legal team already has a single repository. It contains both e-mails and documents, making it easier to find information without having to search across different systems.

Microsoft 365 offers a powerful full text search function, as well as built-in language detection and stemming, which makes it an ideal document management system for legal documents.

Patrick Neill, Senior Legal Counsel

Sika’s IT team wanted this solution to run completely within Microsoft Azure, without virtual or physical servers that require maintenance and are not as cost-efficient as Azure App Services, storage and databases. Together with Sika IT, the complete Qontent Reconcile solution was implemented completely within Microsoft Azure.

Combination with Qwickr

Innovation never stops and Boels Zanders is continuously looking to further optimize its environment for both internal users and clients. In the short term, the company expects to integrate its Neota platform into the Office 365 and Custodian for Legal solution, allowing  it to provide self-service applications, such as contract generators, to clients via SharePoint collaboration rooms and Microsoft Teams. “We’re enjoying the close collaboration with Transform Data and we’re pleased that they listen to us and to our users, trying to understand how they want to work and how they can be more productive,” concludes Nicole van
Rossum, Office and Process Manager, Boels Zanders. “By adopting solutions such as Qwickr and Qontext, we can ensure maximum added value and efficiency to our users.” 

Boels Zanders’ lawyers were frustrated that non text documents such as PDFs were missing from their search results. A good and reliable search function with complete and accurate results is crucial because many business processes depend returned results. They pointed out that doing a conflicts search, or searching for knowledge, as two areas were accuracy was key. To resolve the issue Boels Zanders has chosen to run Transform Data’s Qontent Reconcile and the ability to run this in analysis mode

Analysis Run

The analysis run has shown that of the +/- 100,000 documents, a large amount of tested PDF files did not have an OCR layer so were being excluded from search results. Additionally, 60% of the tested PDF files had an OCR layer but the text layer was incomplete. Qontent Reconcile can optimise this by a factor of three, which results in far superior and accurate search results.

The analysis, that were shared in an extensive report showed clearly that the incomplete searches was justified due to an accurate text layer not being present.

Solution