Clifford Chance gets IT 'weapon'

City law firm Clifford Chance has harnessed the secret IT weapon that helped New Labour defeat the Tories in the last general election.The global firm hopes that Excalibur, the US-made search programme that allowed Millbank spin doctors fend off Tory attacks with rapid responses, will now give it the edge in the competitive legal market.

The new software will upgrade the firm's existing Intranet, by searching the Internet using artificial intelligence technology.

Excalibur Technology's RetrievalWare search system will allow all Clifford Chance lawyers to conduct multi-lingual conceptual searches in which the computer recognises a word's meaning, rather than just searching for specific words or topics.

Clifford Chance professional support lawyer, Andrew Jones, explained: 'It is a semantic network, searching from word to word, rather than statistic to statistic.

There are algorithms in the Excalibur solution.'Up to now, Clifford Chance has used a number of local search engines.

Partner Simon James, who lead the project, said: 'It was important to us because we want to be a seamless law firm.'The firm has completed a pilot in London and five other international offices, including Paris and Amsterdam.

But Mr James said it is not yet in use firm-wide: 'We have to do things at the front end.

It should be up and running in the near future.'It is a 'scalable' solution, which means it can expand indefinitely.

The only limit on its size is its servers, which Clifford Chance can add to as the firm grows.

Mr James said: 'We looked very closely at various other systems, but discounted them in the end because of the scalability.

This was the only one we piloted.' Clifford Chance joins the UK, US, Canadian and Australian governments' intelligence agencies that already use Excalibur, and becomes the first law firm to sign up.

In spite of the high-profile nature of its other clients, which includes corporates such as ICI, an Excalibur spokesman described the law firm as 'a very demanding client'.Clifford Chance lawyers have password access to documents and information, but clients do not have access to the Intranet.

Mr Jones said: 'We will consider it for other extranet services.' It is understood that Clifford Chance is considering applying Excalibur to a trio of on-line services for clients announced last weekIt is adding a cross-border financing guide, a financial markets news service and a sanctions guide to its customer information Web site, NextLaw (www.nextlaw.com).

Anne Mizzi