Use Simple Search to find what you’re looking for.

Start by selecting the type of search you want to carry out using this dropdown. Let’s look at a simple document search.

First, take a look at the search scope, which defines where you are searching. You can choose to search across recent matters or workspaces, which are those you’ve interacted with in the past 30 days, or choose a specific iManage library to search in. Don’t worry if you’re not sure what to select here, you can modify this after you’ve run your search.

Next, you’ll need to select how your search is run. For document searches, the default is title, but you can choose to search using keywords, which searches your documents entire contents. Or, you can search by author, or document number. If I keep ‘title’ selected and search for the term ‘agreement’, you’ll see I get search results with the word agreement in the title. If I rerun that search but choose ‘keyword’, you’ll see I get more results because there are documents which have the term ‘agreement’ in the body text, but not necessarily in the title. This is a great tip if you can’t find what you’re looking for with title search: broaden your results by using keyword search.

Rather than broadening, what if you want to narrow your search results? Another great tip to help you is using additional search terms. So, say the document you’re looking for wasn’t just an ‘agreement’, but a ‘share purchase agreement’. You can narrow your search results by adding those additional terms to the search bar.

What if I want to find a document that I know I created? Well, that’s where the author search comes in. If I select the search bar and choose ‘author operator’ you can see I get a list of users, I can choose my name here and show just the documents that I was the author of.

Now you know Simple Search, continue this useiManage pathway and learn how Advanced Search can help you run title searches, keyword searches, and more, at the same time.

Advanced search allows you to search multiple types of criteria simultaneously. To enable advanced search, select the search bar and toggle the ‘advanced’ switch to on. This switch will remain on for all future searches, unless you turn it off again. You’ll see we have a couple of fields already available in our advanced search. We can use those, or we can remove them here. To add additional fields, use the ‘add another field’ option here, and choose the field to add from the list. When a field is added, you will have additional options like ‘contains’, ‘does not contain’, or the ability to add date ranges. The options available vary based on the field selected. You can also choose to add a field to your advanced search again, adding different criteria and search terms.

The easiest way to learn about Advanced Search is with an example, so let’s build out an advanced search for a document. We know we’re looking for a document on a motion to dismiss, and we know the author of that document was a co-worker called Priya. Now, we also know that Priya worked on a number of motions to dismiss across Iowa and Ohio in 2022, but in our case we want only the Ohio document. Let’s find that document! Start by selecting the Search bar and ensuring advanced is turned on. Now, let’s use the title field here and use ‘contains’ to find documents containing ‘motion to dismiss’ in the title. We want to exclude Iowa, so let’s also add another title field and set ‘does not contain’ and ‘iowa’. We’re not going to use the keyword field so let’s remove it and add another field for create date. We know the document we’re looking for was authored in 2022, so let’s use the between option here and put all of 2022 in. Now we can add the Author field and set it to Priya, who we know created this document. And finally, we want to find the final document which was submitted to the courts, that’s usually a PDF file so let’s add ‘type’ and then PDF. Now we’ll choose search and you can see, using iManage Work Advanced Search we have tracked down exactly the document we’re looking for.