Advanced technology has allowed for greater ease in creating and maintaining a brief bank. Now, a full-text searchable brief bank has a user-friendly interface, similar to Google, but customizable and with quick updates.

The Criminal Defense Resource Center (CDRC) of the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office (SADO) has been serving the Michigan's criminal defense community since 1977 through a host of printed trial manuals, case summaries, newsletters and an indexed brief bank. In June, 1996, SADO launched its web site complete with a full-text searchable brief bank of all its printed materials. While the original search engine, Folio Views, powered the web site for years, recently it was updated with a much easier and user-friendly interface. With today's technology, almost all organizations can easily create and maintain a brief bank even on a shoe-string budget.

In December, 2006, the Criminal Defense Resource Center launched its second generation Brief Bank powered by the Coveo (www.coveo.com) search engine. The relatively simple user interface appears much like the popular search engine, Google, while the back-end is fully customizable and allows for quick updates to the Brief Bank.

SADO's Brief Bank was powered for 10 years by the FolioViews and Folio SiteDirector programs. The robust, full-text search engine provides outstanding results but is out-dated in its support for current word processing programs and incorporating file formats other than word processing. The SADO web site is nationally known in the criminal defense practice as a leader in brief bank development. SADO staff developed criteria in selecting a new full-text search engine which include: a user interface already familiar to users; full-text search capabilities including: proximity, phrase and field searching; customizable user interface; the ability to quickly and easily add documents from many different formats and exploit the metadata capabilities of modern word processors; minimal hard coding of documents; and technical support of the product.

User Interface

User Interface and Full-Text Search

The user interface is by the far the single most important feature of any database. Since financial resources and time are limited for criminal defense attorneys, an intuitive search engine allows more time for legal research. The best interface is one in which users are already familiar. Lawyers are intimately familiar with Westlaw, Lexis and Google. These search engines provide the most valuable interfaces for attorneys. The Brief Bank is built on a model similar to Google. Therefore, the learning curve is minimal and the Brief Bank is intuitive since most people use Google to search the Internet. Immediately upon release, users commented on its instant results and similarity to Google. As with any quality search program, the Coveo product supports full-text searching, use of connecting terms (and, or not, near), as well as phrase, field and proximity searching. For users requiring additional assistance or advanced capabilities, the advanced feature is also very familiar as it, too, mirrors Google's advanced search.

One of the most noticeable differences of the Coveo interface is in the way results are displayed. Documents matching the search criteria are displayed in order of relevance. For SADO's users, this is an enhancement since the FolioViews program simply indicated how many hits were contained within each document. The relevance is based on algorithms. The frequency of terms, position in the document and proximity of search terms are just some of the factors in determining a document's relevancy within a search. Coveo allows the programmer to control additional factors in determining the relevancy of a document.

If the end-user determines that the date of a pleading is more important than relevancy, Coveo provides an option to sort in date order. This is simply done by selecting on the word "date" for reverse chronological order or by selecting "date" a second time to place the oldest document first.

The Coveo search engine also provides additional refinement tools on the right-hand side of the screen. These refinement options allow narrowing within a particular collection, format, author or specific year. This allows the user to quickly drill further into the results based on their needs and experience without having to execute a new search. Also included is the "search within results" feature. If the initial search is too broad, the "search with results" keeps the current research trail and allows for further development.

There are several other features that make the Coveo search engine stand out among other search tools. In particular is its ability to extract keywords from the document and to produce a 100 to 500 word summary of the document automatically. For small organizations, this feature is powerful since an indexer is not required to summarize or extract keywords from documents. While it is impossible to replace the knowledge of a skilled attorney and indexer, Coveo's search engine makes significant strides in automating this feature. This solves one of the most costly problems in the development of a brief bank. Coveo provides other opportunities in assisting the end-user to locate relevant documents. The end-user can rank documents on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. This helps the search engine rank future searches.

Additionally, Coveo allows the end-user to save their query for retrieval at a later time. This is a feature that Westlaw and Lexis also offer. From a research stand-point, this allows the end-user to quickly update their research findings by looking for documents added since they last ran their query.

With minimal or no changing of the web encoded pages, off-the-shelf Coveo presents a terrific user interface which supports every aspect of the SADO Brief Bank.

Back End

Adding Documents

The SADO Brief Bank is currently made up of Microsoft Word and PDF documents. It is crucial to SADO staff that any document format can be incorporated into the Brief Bank as it continues to evolve. The previous version of the Brief Bank required all documents to be imported into a proprietary format. The Coveo search engine supports not only word processing formats of Word and WordPerfect but also PDF, e-mail formats of Lotus and Microsoft, Microsoft Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio and text, html, audio and video files.

Adding documents to the database is simple. One saves the file in a directory on the web server which Coveo indexes. By default the indexes are updated on a daily basis or can be indexed at any time by the administrator of the web site. Indexing time depends on the length and number of documents and the processing power of the web server. Generally, this process can be completed in a matter of minutes and has no impact on users who may be currently searching the brief bank.

Metadata

In making the switch to the Coveo search engine, SADO staff insisted in leaving documents in their original format while taking advantage of the document properties fields or Metadata. Searchable information would be embedded within the original, self-contained file. Metadata captured would include: the document title, author and custom fields like: type of pleading, dates, court docket numbers and subject headings. By self-containing the subject information within the document, it is no longer necessary to maintain a separate "card catalog" to index the Brief Bank. Since the information is in a searchable field, it can still be searched independently.

Adding the Metadata to a document is quite simple. There are two ways that this might be done. First is to require the author/attorney to input required fields. Second is an automated process that captures information from the case management system and routes it to the Metadata. At SADO, the SadCases database contains all the information required for the Metadata fields. Metadata is routed back into the appropriate document property field of the pleading. The document is then saved on the SADO web server in the appropriate directory to be indexed by the Coveo search engine. The processing time for adding pleadings and other material to the Brief Bank was cut by 75%.

Coding of Documents

The first-generation Brief Bank using FolioViews required a programmer to prepare documents for inclusion into the Brief Bank. The Coveo search engine eliminated the need for additional coding. Coveo automatically generates a standard web browser version (HTML) of all documents in the database. This allows the end-user to quickly identify terms searched for within the document. Additionally, it provides a link to the original document in its original format. There is no need for additional HTML or proprietary software codes to be entered into any document.

Replicating the Brief Bank

With minimal training, SADO's brief bank is scaleable to any organization and can be maintained by either support staff or attorneys without much effort. Since the Coveo search engine automatically indexes documents, the only additional work needed is to add to the document properties. This could be done by the attorney or support staff at the time the document is saved. Microsoft Word has an option that will automatically prompt the user for this information. Static information could already be listed in the document properties like author and company. A title, subject, keywords and perhaps some custom fields depending on the brief bank structure could be added. SADO has developed visual basic codes to route this data from its case management system directly into the document properties for an automated approach.

Once the Coveo search engine is in place, there is little maintenance requiring minimal staff time. Documents complete with their properties can be routed to the directory which Coveo indexes on a web server. Since indexing the database can be scheduled, no additional operator input is necessary. Updating the database is quick and easy. Since Coveo can index many different formats, it is unnecessary for support staff or attorneys to be concerned with changing documents into different formats. Simply leaving documents in their native format makes Coveo an outstanding choice for law firms wishing to create an online brief bank.

Technical Support

The technical support of Coveo is superb. Coveo has a user supported forum on their web site and provides e-mail technical support. E-mail support is generally given within 24 hours and provides detailed instructions for resolving any issues. Since the entire Coveo search engine is written using open-standards, it is easy to customize the interface to almost any desire.

Other legal users of Coveo include: Michigan Attorney Discipline Board (www.adbmich.org) and the Georgia Public Defender Standards Counsel (www.gpdsc.com).