Manzama - Helping Legal Professionals to Spot Current Trends
Jinfo Blog

By Chris Porter

Abstract

Chris Porter comments on some stand-out features within Manzama, a current awareness service for lawyers and other professional services users.

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There are certain ways of filtering headline results in aggregation services which have become pretty much an industry standard.

Many providers, in returning a set of headline results, give the user an option to drill down further by selecting from a list of frequently occurring terms within the results set.

Those terms may be drawn from taxonomy tags or automatically-identified entity references, grouped perhaps by industry, region, topic, company or person.

Many services also will offer an article timeline graph, showing volumes of headlines over time, usually - though not always - with the ability to click on a peak or trough on the graph and be taken to the underlying news articles for the date in question.

New-Generation Listening Platform

So it is refreshing to encounter an information vendor who offers something a little bit different.

Manzama was established in 2010 as a specialised, new-generation "listening platform" aimed at legal professionals. It provides both a news dashboard and an alerting service.

Its primary target users are time-pressed professionals in need of an easy-to-use information service, though it also has its attractions for those with more advanced research skills.

Its news dashboard supports all the drill-down and timeline functionality described above; but it also offers some additional features.

One is a "Quick Filters" drop-down option, which will lead the searcher to both user-specified and generally popular filtering terms, as additional options for narrowing their results.

Top Trends

Also, an innovative "Top Trending" feature helps the user to zoom in on topics which have become more prevalent in the news over recent weeks than usual.

If, for instance, you had missed the fact that global business information company and LexisNexis parent Reed Elsevier had decided in recent weeks to rename itself as RELX, this clever Manzama search/research enhancement could quickly help you to pick out that information from a mass of headlines.

Find Out More

To learn more about this and other Manzama capabilities, see the Product Review of Manzama published earlier this month.

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