The rapid adoption of AI across law firms is reshaping nearly every legal role, and knowledge lawyers are no exception. The AI age is an opportunity for knowledge lawyers to flourish, evolve, and in many ways, expand their influence as they work hand in hand with AI and with innovation and technology teams to drive change across their law firms.
A role built on trust
Knowledge lawyers occupy a valued and multifaceted position that sits at the heart of how a sophisticated legal team operates.
They are the trusted resource that anyone on the team, regardless of seniority, turns to when something new, novel, or unexpected crosses their desk: an unusual piece of drafting, a complex argument in a case, or a piece of legislation or case law that needs to be interpreted. Knowledge lawyers operate at the “messy edges” of legal practice to drive clarity, understanding and informed decision making.
They are often the guardians of your team’s best work, capturing knowledge and turning it into trusted, reusable and transferable assets. From precedent banks, template libraries, guidance notes and closing bibles –knowledge lawyers have spearheaded the curation of these resources for years, transforming them into ordered and searchable libraries of gold standard best work.
They also carry substantial training responsibility, nurturing the knowledge and understanding of a team from a trainee lawyer’s first day through to their most senior years. Teams rely on their knowledge lawyers to be constantly future-focused, horizon watching for market and legal changes that impact how they deliver work to their clients.
None of these responsibilities disappear with AI. If anything, AI makes them more important.
From curator of content to curator for AI
With the advance of generative and agentic AI, legal knowledge is becoming far more accessible – and increasingly, lawyers can “self-serve” an answer to a question, regardless of their level of experience or expertise.
We are however, by this point, aware of the risks that AI presents when it operates without appropriate governance and guidance.
Knowledge lawyers set the gold standard for their legal teams. Gathering, assessing, curating, classifying and surfacing best practice materials that ensure their teams deliver consistent, informed, risk managed and best of breed legal advice.
It follows naturally, therefore, that knowledge lawyers should advise on how AI must operate within those standards, too. No longer are knowledge lawyers just curating content for the benefit of their lawyers – they are curating the content for the AI their lawyers are using, ensuring those tools are grounded in rich, accurate and well-maintained legal best practice, as lawyers increasingly seek to connect their chosen AI tools to their knowledge repositories through technologies like Model Context Protocol (a universal standard that enables AI to connect to and exchange data with other systems)
The criticality of curated and accessible best practice knowledge assets is only amplified by other market factors. A move to consumption-based pricing for AI usage will necessitate a need for better curated content for AI to reason over, to minimise the potential token spend incurred when models move through vast amounts of unstructured legal documents and emails. Better curated content means content that is not just relevant and accurate, but enriched with additional meta data that provides signposts for AI, enabling it to work faster and more efficiently. Take, for example, iManage Insight+, which enables knowledge teams to build structured, governed knowledge repositories, enriched with 100 metadata fields, including business context, ensuring that knowledge repositories are not just governed and scalable but much easier to discover by both human and AI users.
Further, as law firms increasingly adopt a “need to know” approach to who can access matters in their libraries (human or AI), asking a lawyer or AI agent to search across previous matters to find “good examples” is becoming increasingly difficult (not to mention expensive) to execute.
Training matters more, not less
As an industry, the concern that AI use is disrupting the skills development of the junior lawyer continues to be grappled with. When combined with the hybrid working model, traditional “learn by doing” and “learn by osmosis” models are fracturing.
Ensuring junior lawyer development of legal understanding and judgement is critical in the AI age. Arguably, the training and development responsibilities of the knowledge lawyer have never been more necessary.
Further, the training environment is changing, with firms and vendors exploring how AI can be used to evolve traditional learning methods through activities such as bespoke drafting and negotiation simulations. The opportunity for knowledge lawyers to be at the forefront of these efforts – assessing, trialling and implementing these platforms – brings a new facet to the training relationship they have with their teams.
Process transformation, for people, with the best vantage point
Designing an AI-enabled workflow is a time-consuming exercise and highly dependent on
close collaboration between the innovation and technology teams leading the transformation effort and the legal domain experts whose work is being transformed. Too often, technology or transformation projects fail because the right combination of change skills, technical knowledge and domain expertise are not identified and committed at the outset.
Tied to a billable hour incentive model, lawyers can, understandably, be reluctant to run up nonchargeable time experimenting with new ways of working, especially on their live client matters.
Knowledge lawyers, who already have that view across a whole practice area, are unusually well placed to lead this work in collaboration with innovation and transformation functions.
Knowledge lawyers have long been involved in exercises like agreeing and automating precedents and developing transaction playbooks – they are skilled at pattern spotting, standardising and scaling.
A repeatable process can be identified, mapped and explored as a transformation opportunity with the insight of a knowledge lawyer who appreciates how that process operates and varies across their team.
A workflow developed with an innovation team for one practice group can be assessed, refined, and productised for use in another with the guidance of a legal SME – a knowledge lawyer. For example, as an innovation lawyer in private practice, I collaborated with the energy knowledge team to deploy AI- driven due diligence techniques developed for the financial services sector for an energy M&A project.
It is this ability to build and replicate success stories that moves an organisation from one whose teams use AI as a personal productivity tool towards an organisation that deploys technology at scale.
Beyond technology, transformation is a human challenge. The relationships that knowledge lawyers build with their teams pays off when it comes to transformation. They understand how their colleagues work, they know what’s acceptable and what isn’t, and they typically have deep, established relationships across their legal teams built on the foundations of their credibility as trusted advisors to change and those “messy edges” of legal practice.
Given all of this, it’s easy to see knowledge lawyers taking a leading role in identifying and driving forward high-value AI use cases.
The ideal guides for the next chapter
As firms race to adopt new technologies, the professionals who can curate trusted knowledge, train lawyers, design better processes, and bring colleagues along on the journey will be in greater demand than ever. The knowledge lawyer role may very well be changing as this latest chapter in the evolution of legal work unfolds – but its strategic importance is only growing.
