Review

Right Click to Knowledge Series

By Kim Plonsky

Just as lawyers use paralegals to save time and increase productivity, Cirilab’s Right Click to Knowledge Series does so for all legal professionals.

The last time I got this excited about discovering a new software program was in 2001, when I was first introduced to LexisNexis’ CaseMap. Of course, readers of this column already know that it doesn’t take much to get me excited about new software products.

At the core of Cirilab’s products is the concept of Information Triage, a process of sorting and organizing materials for specific tasks. The Knowledge Generation Engine is the backbone of Cirilab’s products, and it’s implemented in two Knowledge Interfaces:

• Cirilab Right Click to Knowledge Series (Speed Read, Knowledge Map, Discovery and Mindsystems ThemeReader for MindManager).

• Cirilab Research Workbench (Instigator). 

The Right Click to Knowledge Series is groundbreaking in its ability to quickly and easily harness the overload of electronic data pervasive in today’s hyperpaced world. Whether your task is to review a single document or thousands of documents, this series of products has several software solutions to produce document summaries and to quickly and easily extract relevant information, such as recurring themes and concepts. Cirilab’s technology can process more than 200 file formats, including Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, HTML and plain text.

This series is designed for consumers, and rather than a software program that runs the usual way, the individual components are invoked by right mouseclick, hence the name of the series. For example, right-clicking on a document in Windows Explorer and choosing Speed Read produces a Knowledge View that displays:

• A map of the document showing its major and minor themes or concepts in hierarchical structure — the Knowledge Signature.

• A synopsis of the document based only on its major themes or concepts.

• A detailed summary of the document based on both its major and minor themes or concepts.

• A link to Rapid Reader.

• A link to the entire document in its native format. 

From the Knowledge View in Speed Read, you can quickly navigate through a document by any theme or produce a view showing every paragraph that contains a particular theme. Each word in the document that also is a theme appears as a hyperlink and upon clicking produces a view that shows every paragraph containing that same theme in the document. Speed Read can be an essential tool for paralegals to quickly analyze and summarize electronic data, such as documents, contracts, pleadings, case law and depositions.

Each component in this suite of products is efficiently and logically organized, attractively designed and user-friendly. Knowledge Signature, the presentation of the major and minor themes in the Windows Explorer-like tree structure, provides the reader a quick overview and is the first step toward analyzing a document’s relevance. The Synopsis view usually consists of the first paragraph of a document that contains a major theme, while the Detailed Summary contains all of the paragraphs in a document that have minor or major themes.

Should your analysis prove a document to be relevant, simply jump to it in native format using the handy Entire Document link. Or, you could grab a cup of coffee, sit back, get comfortable and let Rapid Reader read it to you.

Rapid Reader is one of the coolest bonus features in Speed Read and it’s an actual, classic speed-reading tool. With Rapid Reader, the words of a document are displayed — one word at a time — at a speed increment of your choosing, and with pause and reverse. This allows the mind (at least this writer’s mind) to quickly absorb information, almost by osmosis!

A Knowledge Map is quite similar to Knowledge View in that you can create  a collection of documents from almost any form of unstructured text, such as a folder of documents, the contents of a Web site or posts in a blog or discussion group.

Discovery is another unique and innovative new search tool for the Internet. Discovery uses the Knowledge Signature that it creates for a document to produce an Internet search query. Although Discovery uses Yahoo as its default, it can be configured to use other search engines, such as Google, Verity, Autonomy, Gigablast or OmniFind. The possible applications in the legal field for this one tool seem limitless. A few examples that come to mind are Discovery’s ability to create queries from case law to find similar cases, legal theories or arguments, similar products or manufacturers, or any of a document’s major or minor recurring themes.

Mindsystems, a Cirilab partner, produces ThemeReader for MindManager, which also can be found in the Right Click to Knowledge Series, and it exports the thematic content of a document into a MindManager mind map. According to www.wiki pedia.com, “a mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea.”

Cirilab’s other product, Research Workbench (Instigator), is offered to the business community as part of its Enterprise Solutions. Instigator includes the same components as the Right Click to Knowledge Series, but also includes Web Ready Publishing, which allows you to share the knowledge you have discovered with others using the Internet or an intranet.

Whether you are a paralegal or a lawyer, Cirilab has unveiled the world of Information Triage. Or, as Cirilab has put it: “Locate. Classify. Triage. Publish.”