Article | September 2025
Tiger Eye recently met with three legal knowledge management specialists for an insightful panel discussion, exploring the importance and benefits of harnessing knowledge in the legal sector. We met with Helene Russell (Knowledge Management Consultant and Founder of TheKnowledgeBusiness), Richard Gaston (Head of Knowledge & Research at Addleshaw Goddard) and Alex Smith (Global Search & AI Product Lead at iManage) to capture their unique perspectives on these themes and share ideas for key processes such as measuring knowledge and using knowledge technologies.
Knowledge is still a competitive differentiator, especially in the age of AI
We began our panel exploring what knowledge is today, and why firms should harness knowledge.
To summarise, our panellists commented that every law firm’s unique selling point is ultimately knowledge based. A competitive edge is formed when firms can understand and leverage their unique blend of what the firm knows about the law, the market and their clients specifically.
Commonly, firms begin to explore knowledge management (KM) to ensure standardisation. Creating templates, precedents, checklists and best practice guides, organisations can set standards across employee work, and create greater consistency throughout processes, protecting the quality of output and the brand’s reputation.
New technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be enablers for managing knowledge, surfacing content and enriching insights. Yet, most firms are ultimately drawn to AI solutions for benefits across fee-earning processes; reducing time waste, increasing productivity and expanding what can be done within the working day. In the age of AI, knowledge is ever-more crucial, to create databases which are trusted and governed, from which AI solutions can ingest data and deliver high-value, credible results. Knowledge is the key to unlocking the benefits of these new solutions, which can drive greater competitive advantages in accelerating the delivery of expertise to clients, or improving the quality of communications, in drawing from a wider range of sources.
Without knowledge underpinning new AI solutions, the results delivered cannot be trusted. It is clear that if incorrect results or even hallucinations are shared with clients, this can be detrimental to the practice. Yet, beyond this, firms may risk losing their competitive advantage if competitors in the market can leverage knowledge – and new AI technologies – faster and more effectively. It is clear that knowledge is still a competitive differentiator in the age of AI, with ever greater impacts as technology – and its potential – evolves.
AI is influencing the perspective of KM – but KM is still a human practice
Many readers will be familiar with the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ idiom, which refers to the idea that the quality of a system’s output is directly reliant on the quality of the system’s inputs. During the event, our panellists discussed that this is now being more widely understood in the legal market with the context of AI and its meteoric rise, as these new technologies are influencing the perspective of the importance of knowledge itself – as well as the essential practice of managing and surfacing know-how.
Alex Smith (Global Search & AI Product Lead at iManage), commented:
“We are at an interesting inflection point or change point – and I mean change in perception rather than what is needed to be delivered… Knowledge Management has a very large scope, and can include things like training, learning, and all of those aspects… [as well as] content, data and insights… As AI has come through, we are getting to a point where we understand that content and context are very important to AI… Now there is a lot of interest [from the wider firm] in what we [as knowledge specialists] do with content and how explicit that needs to be in light of some of these emerging tools.”
As our panel surmised, it is more efficient to have a curated set of high-value data being interrogated by AI rather than a large, messy dataset. In many cases, securing, structuring and surfacing the knowledge needed is still a very much a human process. What’s more, interrogating the responses of AI solutions is still reliant on the critical thinking of legal specialists – and often knowledge teams – to ensure quality outputs and protect the firm from risk.
Richard Gaston (Head of Knowledge & Research at Addleshaw Goddard) commented on the “human factors at play” outside of the process of knowledge capture and curation. Managing attitudes to risk is essential when adopting any new technology, including AI, which can pose many challenges including hallucinations. Adoption and change management are also human-led processes, and knowledge specialists are well-positioned to lead this change, with honed skills, critical thinking and firm-wide understanding.
Continuing this theme, our panellists commented that understanding when to use AI is also still a very human process, and one that is commonly facilitated by knowledge teams, who understand the firm as a business, but also as a community, creating the organisation’s ‘collective wisdom’. Helene Russell (Knowledge Management Consultant and Founder of TheKnowledgeBusiness) referenced that knowledge teams have become an increasingly important asset for innovation departments within law firms, because knowledge specialists connect many aspects of the firm through their work, and they have a unique understanding of the people, process and technology needed to drive meaningful change.
Our panellists also discussed the importance of process in AI adoption. Mapping, refining and adapting processes in law firms is still very commonly a human-led initiative, which relies on experts to understand the firm and what is has today, before they can improve it. Though AI delivers a wide range of potential, it will only make a meaningful impact if users are wise in how they use it.
Measuring the impact of knowledge can still be a challenge
Unfortunately, the work of Knowledge Management teams can be taken for granted, because it is often a ‘hidden practice. Knowledge Management teams focus on removing challenges for others; minimising administration from workflows and taking out the ‘guess work’. Being successful in these tasks means being unseen, underpinning processes and guiding fee-earners from behind the scenes.
Our panellists likened Knowledge Management to a “journey without a final destination”. Knowledge specialists help firms to realise their drive for continuous improvement and the end goal, or horizon, is never meant to be met. Specific objectives and initiatives may target particular outcomes, but as the firm’s collective wisdom grows and changes, so too does the work of the Knowledge Management teams.
Helene Russell (Knowledge Management Consultant and Founder of TheKnowledgeBusiness) commented on the impact of knowledge on employees, from improving the working experience (by reducing low-level administrative work) to making the workplace more enticing to experts outside of the firm. These improvements can be hard to measure, but capturing relevant stories and case studies can bring this impact to the fore and show the wider benefits of knowledge within a law firm.
Yet, it’s still crucial to highlight the valuable work of these specialists and quantify results whenever possible. When it comes to measuring the impact of knowledge, our panellists suggested starting small and focusing on “micro wins” – showing how improvements in a workflow phase or a specific task can help the firm to ‘win back’ time. Five minutes regained can be used to deliver greater value elsewhere, and when these micro wins repeat, the value of improvements mounts.
For many firms, these “micro wins” may centre on the value of precedents and templates, and the impacts of these on time-waste and avoiding risk. With reliable, curated and up-to-date templates ready to use, the firm can avoid the risk of accidentally copying client data from old documents into new resources (a practice all too common in firms without the right solutions in place). When precedents and best practice resources are centralised, enriched and easy to find, every member of the firm can save time in searching for the knowledge needed to get work done. Better yet, when content is available via one dedicated site or platform, firms can cut out delays that stem from application overload.
But even before these “micro wins”, even the practice of organising content can have a significant impact across the firm, and this shouldn’t be forgotten. In better managing content, KM systems and practitioners reduce the risk of human error and of out-of-date or inaccurate guidance being delivered to clients. When knowledge is organised and delivering value, AI solutions can process high-impact databases and deliver credible results, reducing risk and driving efficiency across the firm. Ultimately, even the fundamental aspects of knowledge management can deliver significant gains for law firms.