Pike & Fischer
Established in 1939 and a member of The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. family of publishers, Pike & Fischer provides authoritative legal and business reference services, newsletters, special reports and directories. Its products include legal reference services in internet law, communications law, administrative law and shipping regulations.
The Challenge
Pike & Fischer originally designed its legal reference services for CD-ROM with an interface that required extensive training and technical support to navigate.
Users were also unable to search across all content, impeding their access to potentially meaningful sources. Pike & Fischer sought a transformation of its services into straightforward, comprehensive
Web-based products, and entrusted their vision to Contegra Systems’ knowledge and experience.
The Contegra Solution
Contegra Systems worked closely with Pike & Fischer to synthesize client-based market research with design and functionality. To bring its services to the next level,
it was determined that a sophisticated search engine should be incorporated with a custom designed Web interface. This combination should allow for complex queries, and yet be simple enough for
a novice to operate. dtSearch was chosen as the search engine that would meet Pike & Fischer’s requirements. Several different user interface layouts, all of which were
closely analyzed for aesthetic merit and intuitiveness, were presented, and the best one was selected.
After migrating the legal reference services from Folio to HTML, the sites were integrated with dtSearch and the newly designed interface, allowing users to narrow searches easily by criteria, such as docket number, document number, citation, date parameters and keywords, and to search across all content, within results, and within specific documents. Ranking results by relevance gave priority to the material a customer would most likely find useful, making the search process much simpler and quicker.
Pike & Fischer also partnered with Contegra Systems to create a PDF retrieval system for FCC Record documents — a new and exclusive addition to Pike & Fischer’s services. As textual electronic versions of FCC documents do not provide the page numbers and citations that lawyers need to file briefs and conduct thorough legal research, this new content served as an invaluable resource for Pike & Fischer’s customers.
"The door of my office is plastered with printouts of positive feedback from early users of the new sites," said Meg Hargreaves, President and Publisher of Pike & Fischer. "One Communications lawyer said, ‘Pike & Fischer’s new Communications Regulation website is a rarity — a collection of improvements that actually do improve!’" In regards to the Internet Law & Regulation web service, another client commented: "One of the best-organized web sites I've seen. It's all there, even the little details."
Communications Regulation (http://commreg.pf.com), Pike & Fischer’s flagship product, was named a 2005 Codie Finalist for Best Online Government Information Service. Other web services redesigned with Contegra Systems are the Broadcast (http://broadcastregs.pf.com), Cable (http://cableregs.pf.com), and Wireless (http://wirelessregs.pf.com) FCC Rules sites, and the Internet Law and Regulations site (http://www.ilrweb.com).
Screenshots of the Contegra solution:
(click the thumbnail to enlarge)
Contegra Systems continues to work with Pike & Fischer on redesigning some of its other web services.
More Case Studies:
 Developing and supporting up-to-the-minute Web sites and CD-ROMs for internists and surgeons. |
 Making research accessible to developing countries around the globe. |