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NetApp Helps Thomson Reuters to Improve Legal Search Solution

"64% faster than other online search platforms"

Without information, organizations stall
and innovative ideas don’t see the light of day. Thomson Reuters, a leading source of intelligent information, is focused on one goal – to put the
right information into the right hands to help clients produce amazing results.
Delivering on this promise requires an IT infrastructure that can support
game-changing products and services.

Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research service stores more
than 5 billion documents and is used by approximately 98% of the largest law firms
in the United States.
Even though Westlaw was considered the preferred legal research service,
Thomson Reuters recently embarked on a journey to take WestlawNext, which they
launched in 2010, to even greater heights. The goal was to create an intuitive research and workflow tool that would make legal research as easy as
Internet search. To realize this goal, Thomson Reuters needed to enhance its
existing private and public cloud infrastructure to support WestlawNext. With a
storage infrastructure built on NetApp, WestlawNext not only
became a reality but set a new standard for online professional search. To
date, more than 20,000 law firms, corporate law departments, and government
customers have adopted WestlawNext, and it was named the New Product of the
Year for 2011 by the American Association of Law Libraries.

"We consider NetApp to be a key strategic IT partner,
and the choice to build on the NetApp storage foundation was clear,
" said
Rick King, chief technology officer, Thomson Reuters Professional Division.
"WestlawNext is a revolutionary product that required a storage foundation
that would deliver the dynamic search capabilities and unique customer
experience we were looking for. Working with NetApp enabled us to fundamentally
transform how legal research is conducted and provide the legal industry with
the most powerful and innovative product of its kind in the market.
"

Building on a
NetApp shared storage infrastructure gave Thomson Reuters the flexibility they
needed to create a WestlawNext product that delivers a new level of search
performance. NetApp’s network file system (NFS) allows the service to search up to 50 times more data and return results
64% faster than other online search platforms.

Lawyers work
around the clock, and WestlawNext needs to work around the clock with them.
NetApp partnered with Thomson Reuters developers to create a replication
process that enables WestlawNext to meet or exceed a 99.9% uptime target,
giving lawyers around the world the confidence of knowing that critical
information is available to them whenever they need it.

The shared storage
infrastructure supports the search capability of WestlawNext.
NetApp enables the service to deliver 50 related pieces of information for a
single search request, helping clients do their jobs effectively and
efficiently.

Leveraging a
virtualized, shared infrastructure built on NetApp, Cisco, and VMware
technologies has led to savings and efficiencies for Thomson Reuters that
include a 25% reduction in power consumption.

Improved storage
performance helped save nearly $65 million
by eliminating the need to build a
second data center originally thought necessary to house the WestlawNext
platform.

Rick King, chief
technology officer, Thomson Reuters Professional Division, said: "WestlawNext
truly pushes the boundaries of what is possible with search. We set out to
deliver a first-of-its-kind product to the legal industry, and it’s unreal to
think that a legal search product could elicit such an emotional and
overwhelming response from clients. Our partnership with NetApp helped make
this possible. The technological demands placed on our IT infrastructure from
the development process through production are amazing, and the NetApp shared
infrastructure never blinked once.
"

Manish Goel,
executive vice president of Product Operations, NetApp, said: "Information
is the backbone of Thomson Reuters. How they leverage and deliver that
information is what sets them apart from the rest of the industry. When Thomson
Reuters approached NetApp with their vision for WestlawNext, we were excited to
roll up our sleeves and partner with them to make it happen. The broad acceptance
from the legal industry is proof that the storage infrastructure a company
builds on can make the difference between success and failure.
"

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