International Legal Technology Association

As a professional organization that helps legal professionals share their knowledge, member-created content is a core feature of the ILTA website. But like many member organizations, ILTA was relying on Higher Logic for its CMS capabilities, and the built-in search function left much to be desired. To ensure that members could find the content they were looking for – whether it was hosted on Higher Logic, YouTube, or Podbean – they turned to Foster Made to modernize their search capabilities. The goal was to showcase the revamped search function to four thousand attendees at ILTA’s annual conference, called ILTACON. The catch was, ILTACON was quickly approaching.

Higher Logic was built specifically for member organizations like ILTA. In ILTA’s case, using it as a CMS made it an integral platform in their stack, but with its dated approach to APIs, it doesn’t always play well with other tools. As ILTA’s content needs expanded over time, they had to use filler content to represent videos and podcasts hosted on YouTube and Podbean. Members had to search and find this filler, and then click on it to be redirected to the actual content.

To rectify this situation, we built a middle layer that communicated with all of ILTA’s content sources so everything could be indexed. We were then able to implement a federated search experience with Algolia, which not only returns accurate results as fast as you can type but also allowed ILTA to include more fine-tuned filters that further improved the search experience.

While building the infrastructure necessary to implement Algolia, we set it up so ILTA could take advantage of Algolia’s analytics features. Analytics give ILTA insight into what their members are searching for, and how easily they’re finding it. With this information, they can continually improve the search process by doing things like creating new content, adjusting ranking factors, or even adjusting results for specific queries.

In addition to the benefits that analytics provide, they also serve as the basis for Algolia's more advanced features, including AI Search, AI Recommend, and Dynamic Re-Ranking.